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Home › Articles › Toddlers › Plain and Simple Toddler Play

Plain and Simple Toddler Play

The Benefits of Homemade Toys

By Sally Goldberg, Ph.D

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Color boxes and cards can be enriched by color books, which are bracketed color folders filled with matching colored paper. The books are completed with items of that color, such as cutouts from magazines or the actual items such as ribbons, coasters, bells and more. You can add descriptive words, phrases or sentences to the pages as desired.

The idea is to start off with the color red, which is the first and most attractive color to a toddler. Next is to add a second color of your choice. You can do this by making all the boxes first or by making a box, card and book set for each color.

Mirror Play
An unbreakable mirror is an excellent toy. When your toddler sees his own image, he reacts. That reaction causes the image to change. That change causes another reaction, and so on. The process is free-form and creative and stimulates language development. The unbreakable mirror is interesting to see, interesting to touch, interesting for interaction and full of intrinsic surprise qualities.

Simple Ball
A ball never does the same thing twice. Each roll or bounce is different. The simple ball gives a toddler many happy hours of play. Start with rolling the ball back and forth. You can then add bouncing. Throwing the ball to each other should be the last stage.

The fascination with discovering all the different rolls, bounces and throws provides a never-ending amount of play. The ball is interesting to see, interesting to touch, great fun for interaction and always full of surprises.

"Exploration" and "experimentation" are the key words for understanding toddlers, and homemade toys and simple activities are the basics for beneficial play. Rather than wanting to be told what to do, toddlers want to handle objects and uncover hidden secrets. They want to participate in just the kind of interactions that invite their parents into their world of play.

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