Toddler Fun With Boxes

Watch and listen to Ann McKitrick explain how you can create fun activities for toddlers using boxes.

Subscribe to Youtube Channel

Toddler Fun With Boxes

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you might have a bunch of empty boxes at your house. I was just thinking about what we might be able to do with boxes with our young children, since we are kind of stuck inside the house these days. First of all, there’s all different sizes of boxes but you want to collect big boxes to use for fun activities. You can use the boxes that you get things delivered in. Food boxes and cereal boxes are a really great size for kids to play with.

Here are some fun activities you can do with your toddler using boxes:

• You can put things inside. You can put a baby or a toddler who is able to crawl and move around in the box. They would be able to put things inside the box, you could even close it up and play hide-and-seek. Where are the things in the box? If the box is a little bit bigger, they might be able to get inside the box and crawl in and out. Placing things inside would be something that a really young child will enjoy doing. Then of course, dump it, fill it, dump it, fill it, dump it. That’s what toddlers like.
• If you have a really big box, you could fill it with pillows and blankets. It could be like a little quiet nook. You could put some books in there, maybe a little flashlight to look at the books.
• Let the child sit inside the box with markers, crayons, or chalk. This is kind of a way to contain where they’re writing.
• Put your kid inside the box and push it around. This could be a fun thing to do around the house. If a child is learning to walk and kind of gaining some stability by holding onto things, a box that’s got something heavy enough in it to give it the friction that’s needed, they might be able to use that as almost like a little Walker.
• Make box houses. Gigantic boxes make really neat little houses for kids and you can cut the windows and doors out. You might want to just use some duct tape around the cut edge just to give it a little bit of softness because actually cardboard can be kind of rough and too sharp for little kids if they fall against it. Windows and doors in a big box make for great fun and that can actually stay in your play space for quite a long time. You can put all kinds of things inside that box. You can put little battery-operated lights. You can take toilet paper rolls and have them put ping pong balls through those rolls. They could paint the box or write all over it.
• Tape the boxes up and then use them as big blocks. You could just stack these and then knock them over. It could be a lot of fun! If you wanted to make it more interesting, you could put something inside it before you knock it down. Something that has a little bit of sound to it.

Boxes provide a lot of entertainment if you use your imagination. I hope you enjoyed the ideas for using the boxes in your recycle bin to put to good use and I hope you have fun with it!