When it comes to your toddler’s development, a lot happens between the ages of 2 and 3. And there are lots of things you can do as a parent to support that development. These 17 easy and fun learning activities for 2 year-olds are great way to foster your child’s growth and development.
*Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links, including links to Amazon, and as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. I only recommend resources, products, and services that I adore and find to be useful. If you happen to make a purchase using one of my affiliate links, I will earn a small commission, at no additional cost to you. Read more about our policies here.
Learning Through Play Activities for 2 Year-Olds
One of the best ways for children to learn is through play.
Play allows them to experience the world through multiple senses, as with sensory play. Play is a wonderful way to help your child target their developmental milestones, too. Learning through play also gives kids an opportunity to use their imagination, which is super developmentally-appropriate for 2 year-olds.
In addition to using their imagination, there’s more to know about your child’s capability during this stage and what milestones you should be watching out for. The learning activities below were chosen with these things in mind. They are perfect for your child’s developmental stage and ability, and they will help you target those developmental milestones every 2 year-old is working to master. 🙂
Developmental Stage and Ability
Kids between the ages of 2 and 3 are capable of quite a lot! They are developing their physical skills, cognitive skills, language skills, social-emotional skills, and more.
This exciting stage of development is sometimes referred to as the ‘terrible twos’. But when you realize that those incessant no’s and floor-dropping tantrums are just your child’s natural push for independence, it’s easy to see there’s really nothing terrible about it! Challenging and exhausting, yes, but terrible, no. 🙂
Your kid is learning how to be their own person, how to understand their world, and how to do things just like you. So why not harness that energy with learning activities for 2 year-olds that work with their drive for independence, not against it? The activities below will help you do just that.
Developmental Milestones
It’s helpful to remember that kids develop at their own pace. Sometimes they develop along a one track at a time. For example, if your child’s verbal language is blowing up, it might mean her physical development is on pause for the time being. The point is, just because your child hasn’t hit a specific milestone yet, it doesn’t mean that they won’t suddenly achieve it in the next week or two.
Hitting Milestones and When to Worry
Resources from the CDC, or your country’s equivalent, can tell you what’s expected and when it’s time reach out to your doctor. And you can always ask you child’s pediatrician if you are worried about specific milestones. If your child is still within the expected age range to hit a certain milestone, more often than not, they are just on their own unique developmental path.
Be as patient as you can and try not to pressure your child into doing the desired behaviors. Let them learn at a comfortable pace. Fun activities (like the ones below) that foster learning offer excellent opportunities for your child to practice new skills and ultimately achieve their milestones.
Though there are loads of milestones that 2 year-olds may achieve, here are some of the main ones to focus on, as recommended by the CDC:
Physical Milestone Activities for 2 Year-Olds
- Climbs fairly well
- Walks up and down stairs one foot per step
- Runs with ease
- Able to pedal a tricycle
Social-Emotional Milestone Activities for 2 Year-Olds
- Shows concern when someone is upset
- Imitates adults and peers
- Takes turns when playing a game
- Displays a wide range of emotions
Cognitive Milestone Activities for 2 Year-Olds
- Copies a circle with pencil or crayon
- Can work toys with buttons, levers, and moving parts
- Plays make-believe with dolls, animals, and people
- Builds towers of 6 or more blocks
- Able to complete a 3-4 piece puzzle
Language Milestone Activities for 2 Year-Olds
- Follows 2 or 3-step instructions
- Carries on a conversation made up of 2-3 sentences
- Able to say their name, age, and gender
- Can name most familiar things
To learn more about development between the ages of 2 and 3, check out this slideshow from Parent.com or this article from the CDC, which includes info on how to download their milestone tracker app.
17 Learning Activities for 2 Year-Olds
Now that you have a good idea about the milestones your 2 year-old is developing, you can design your own (very do-able) series of play activities for your 2 year-old. Here are some of my tried-and-true learning activities for 2 year-olds. They are super easy to throw together and your 2 year-old will love them!
- Beans and Pompom Tray
- Shape Puzzles and Shape Sorters
- Baking Cookies
- Stacking with Blocks
- Learning Apps
- Fun with Glue
- Busy Board Play
- Finger Painting
- Water Play
- Pouring Station
- Museum Exploration
- Painting at an Easel
- Sensory Play Outdoors
- DIY Shape and Color Game
- Memory Game
- Paper Flowers
- Fun with Emotions
- Beans and Pompom Tray
When it comes to learning how to scoop and pour, dried beans are an excellent material. They are cheap, durable, and easy to clean up. Plus, their color and texture are fun for 2 year-olds to play with. For this sensory activity, I combined kidney beans and colorful pompoms for a fun tray activity. Don’t know what it is about pompoms, but my toddler is obsessed! These are the pompoms I buy from Amazon. They come with googly eyes! 🙂
- Shape Puzzles and Shape Sorters
Shape sorters and shape puzzles are a great way to help your child learn to categorize objects, identify colors and shapes, and stack and match objects. They offer an opportunity to sharpen fine motor skills through tactile play and also help with problem-solving skills.
These two are our absolute favorites: the LOVEVERY Peg Puzzle (part of their play kits) and the Melissa and Doug Stack and Sort Board. (see below)
- Baking Cookies
Last Christmas, I started a new tradition of baking cookies, and my daughter absolutely loved it! I enjoyed watching her experiment. She had so much fun squeezing the dough, using the rolling pin, and pressing the cookie cutters down to create shapes. We used these cookie cutters from Amazon, which were really nice because they have a silicone covering that’s soft the touch when you press down on them.
If you and your kiddo really get into the baking scene, you might want to get a subscription to something like Baketivity. They send you fun baking kits each month, specifically designed for family fun.
You can get 10% off this month’s Baketivity box with code BAKE10.
- Stacking with Blocks
One of the CDC developmental milestones mentioned above relates to stacking blocks. In my opinion, there is no better way to help your child learn to do that than with a big pack of of Mega Bloks. We have the Mega Bloks First Builders Big Building Bag and my daughter is a block-stacking rock star thanks to how much fun these blocks are! They stack smoothly and come in bright colors (great for sorting, too). She has gotten lots of practice with stacking blocks thanks to this block set and she is able to stack regular old blocks pretty high as well.
- Learning Apps
So we got into learning apps around the time that we decided we were going to enroll our toddler in preschool. We knew she would be one of the youngest kids there (turning 3 about five days before the cutoff), so we wanted to ensure she would feel ready. Replacing TV time with educational app play made screen time much more productive. Don’t get me wrong Dora is great, but these learning apps are incredible!
We love ABCmouse the most because it’s set up like a toddler classroom. Get a free trial for ABCmouse here. We also love the other amazing learning apps I talk about in this post, too.
- Fun With Glue
It was our LOVEVERY play kit subscription that first helped us realize how much our daughter loves playing with glue. One of the play kits came with precut shapes and a bottle of glue and it was over after that. 🙂 Ever since, we have done countless ooey-gluey crafts with pompoms, googly eyes, bits of paper, and even glitter, much to my daughter’s delight.
Not only are these activities great for sensory play, but they also sharpen fine motor skills. The LOVEVERY play kit also included a little paint brush and glue tub for more precise gluing. I didn’t think my rambunctious 2 year-old would be able to handle such precision, but she loved that part the most!
- Busy Board Play
When it comes to activities for 2 year-olds, busy boards are an excellent choice. They target fine motor skills, problem-solving skills, and engage the senses. Plus, they help your kiddo achieve a few of their developmental milestones.
In my opinion, the best (and most affordable) busy board you can get is this Montessori-style busy board from OleOletOy. If you are super crafty, you could also make your own.
- Finger Painting
Finger painting is one of my favorite activities to set up for my toddler. She loves the way the paint slides around and mixes together. It’s an awesome sensory play activity. We use the Washable Finger Paint Set from Crayola to make things easier. It comes with 4 paint tubes (Red, Yellow, Green, Blue) and 10 Large Sheets of Special Paper. The paints are washable so it’s super easy clean up.
- Water Play
When it comes to easy activities for 2 year-olds, nothing beats water! Whether it’s in a tray, in the bath, or in a water table, water play allows your child to really dive in, make a splash, and drink it all in! 🙂 (Disclaimer: I do not apologize for those water puns.)
You can do water play activities ranging from a simple sponge and tray, to something more interactive like a water table. We adore this Little Tikes Frog Pond Water Table. It has little sling shots on the side and you can try and land your frogs on the center lily pad (see below). Highly recommend!
- Pouring Station
And speaking of water…making a pouring station is super easy. All you need is a safe space for water play, a collection of cups, containers, and pouring pitchers, and water. Sometimes we will use food coloring to dye the water different colors for added fun. I especially enjoy the picnic set from one of our LOVEVERY subscription play kits. The colorful metal pitcher is the perfect size for toddler hands.
- Museum Exploration
We are lucky enough to have lots of excellent museums in our area and we especially love our natural history museum. Lots of places for toddlers to roam and explore and touch and engage. Really perfect for learning and development. Major bonus for our daughter who is obsessed with dinosaurs.
- Painting at an Easel
Painting activities make wonderful activities for 2 year-olds because they promote fine motor skill development and provide an excellent sensory experience. When you set up for your child to paint at an easel, you also nurture her physical development, too.
Working on a vertical surface does wonders for your kid’s coordination! We adore our standing art easel not only for it’s storage space and ease of use, but for it’s multi-functionality as a vertical workspace for our toddler. This art easel supply pack from Melissa and Doug has everything you need to go with your standing art easel.
- Sensory Play Outdoors
It’s free, it’s beautiful, and it’s good for your mental health. It’s the great outdoors!
Go for a hike, start a leaf collection, create a scavenger hunt, play hide and seek – the outdoor activities for 2 year-olds are endless when you are exploring green spaces. Your kids will love the freedom to roam and you will love the peace of mind that they can explore in an open area. When we are looking for a stress free way to get our daughter some exercise, we hit up our local county park and all it’s well-maintained natural beauty!
- DIY Shape and Color Game
In the early days of the COVID shutdown, I was looking for new and fun learning activities for my 2 year-old. Inspired by something I saw on Pinterest, I came up with this DIY shape and color sorting game. I bought some tempera paint, some sticky Velcro strips, and some painters tape. Then I upcycled an old Amazon box to create the game below. My daughter could stick the shapes onto the box, sorting them by color or shape.
It was easy to make and honestly kind of of fun to put together. (I needed all the creative outlets I could find during the shutdown, LOL.) My daughter had a blast playing with my creation and she got lots of practice with identifying and sorting colors and shapes.
Creative activities for kids, self-care tips for parents, family bonding ideas & more with the Centered Parenting Facebook Group. Join now!
- Memory Game
While your child may not seem ready for a memory game, it can still be a really helpful learning tool when it comes to developmental milestones for 2 year-olds. The more you play with memory game cards, the more your child will get the hang of it. When we first got the memory cards pictured below, our 2 year-old simply enjoyed flipping the cards over to see what images lay hidden beneath. But after a while she started to really grasp the idea of finding a match for ‘orange car’ and trying to recall where she saw it last.
The memory game pictured below came with one of our beloved LOVEVERY play kits. The cards are durable and high-quality, and the images are super fun and easy for little ones to identify. It comes with a little storage box to keep them in, too.
And we also adore this wooden memory game from Melissa and Doug, which got the American Academy of Pediatrics seal of approval for fostering brain development. It’s got a “flip-to-win” feature that means no loose pieces so it’s awesome for travel. It comes with 7 different double-sided, themed cards to slide into the game board. It’s honestly genius. FYI: It says ages 5+ on the Melissa and Doug website, but I feel like it works well for 2 year-olds, too.
- Paper Flowers
We got this activity idea from one of the Orange Art Box subscription boxes we recently received.
Side note, Orange Art Box is a fantastic subscription box for kids, always beautifully packed with super creative art activities! It’s geared toward slightly older kids but what is so awesome is that many of the art activities work well for 2 year-olds, too. Like this paper flowers activity!
It came with cutout paper flowers (that felt like coffee filter material), a water color set, and bright green pipe cleaners for the ‘stems’. Our toddler had an absolutely amazing time swirling the water color onto the super absorbent flowers. When they were dry, we fashioned them onto the pipe cleaner stems. My daughter was so proud of the finished product. Our lovely paper flower bouquet is pictured below.
If you want to get an Orange Art Box subscription for your kiddos, you can get 15% off with code THECENTEREDPARENT.
- Fun with Emotions
Books and games are the perfect vehicles to boost your child’s emotional intelligence. We used this book, Baby Faces Peekaboo, when our daughter was in early toddlerhood to teach her about what different emotions look like on other children. She especially loved the textured pages and the peekaboo flipbook parts of the book.
Nowadays, she is able to recognize our emotions easily and she has even created her own game where she names an emotion and we make that face, or vice versa. It’s a blast.
I also highly recommend these awesome emotional learning flash cards that use real-life pictures to depict a range of emotions.
Emotional Learning Flash Cards
And for more emotion regulation support, the My Moods, My Choices Flipbook uses adorable little monsters to do the job, and it’s an excellent way to teach your child how to manage their emotions as well.
(For more on that, check out my post on Emotional Meltdowns and How to Stop Them.)
Thank you so much for exploring my collection of fun and easy learning activities for 2 year-olds. I just know you and your little one are going to have a blast learning through play! Don’t forget to tell us how it goes in the comments below!
Want more awesome stuff from The Centered Parent? Join our mailing list below!
