It’s not easy to keep your little ones engaged. In this article, we discuss some simple home activities for 4 year olds that will stimulate their minds while also keeping them busy!
Even though there are innumerable activities that parents and guardians can do with four year olds, one finds themselves running out of ideas thanks to how quickly kids get bored of pretty much anything.
At the age of three to four, children tend to become more active. Keeping them busy can be a tough task at this age.
But fret not; many parents and guardians are in the same boat. There are creative solutions to keep a 4 year old busy. Read ahead to see a bunch of activities for four year olds that one can carry out in the comfort of their home.
Art and Craft Activities
Get coloring with those crayons.
Believe us, and we are taken back to our childhood days as we mention Crayola. Kids enjoy the idea of playing with colors.
Gather all stationery supplies that you need and spend some time coloring with your kid. You can make a line drawing for them or download a printable line drawing and you are all set.
Often, your four year old would have a box full of old and broken crayons. You can easily make a recycled crayon craft with your child. Not only is it fun, recycling is great for the environment.
Creating a self-portrait
Make them sit so that they can see themselves or make them sit in front of a mirror. Let the child create art in an abstract and fun way with no rules.
Give them colorful supplies and see how they do it, and do not forget to appreciate them. Activities like the above help kids learn how to stay concentrated and be on a task until they reach its end.
Sensory Development Activities
Sensory play helps shape development and growth in little beings; it helps build observation, thought processes, and experimentation. If your child is special needs, sensory toys can help them develop their learning and cognitive abilities.
Make a sensory bin.
It is time for your little explorer to bury and explore. Making a sensory bin is a fairly easy and inexpensive task. You can add anything and everything from rocks, toys, pens, pencils, and cups. All you need to do is bury them in the sand! Let the child figure out what the object is by digging into the sand.
A cautionary note on this activity:
- Be careful that the objects don’t have sharp edges or poses any hazard to your child.
- Ensure all such activities are carried out under adult supervision because kids tend to use their hands and their mouth.
- One needs to be even more careful if they add any edible items in the sensory bin, such as pasta.
Build with Playdough
Playdough has limitless opportunities, thanks to its flexible and moldable nature. Hours may pass, and one can find themselves molding and remolding again.
Kids can use their creativity and imagination to create something with the dough. It will keep your child engaged and attentive.
Spend time with Slime
Slime is a great sensory tool for kids. It is versatile and can keep a four year old engaged for hours. There are many things that kids can create from slime.
You can even encourage them to explore and come up with their own ideas.
Cognitive Development Activities
Cognitive development activities inculcate learning with play to ensure your child engages in the activities better while also assimilating new information.
Sorting and Matching Games
A publication by Harvard University mentions how introducing rules such as the first sort based on color and then based on shape can help promote cognitive flexibility. One can give them a bunch of objects.
S’Match and Quirkle are two commercially available games that challenge cognitive flexibility. Other games can be Bingo or Lotto, in which children have to mark a card with the exact opposite of what is being called out.
Puzzles
Slightly complicated puzzles can also be introduced to kids in the four year age group as simpler ones may be too easy for them to stay concentrated. Puzzles like these will exercise their visual working memory and enhance their planning and organizing skills. If you want, you can make your own jigsaw puzzle. It will allow you to do some craft work withy our kid and also save you some money.
Letter and Number Games
Show them some placards and let them identify which number and alphabet are missing. You can also use alphabet and number songs to familiarize them with the same. There are many ptintables available online that you can download to get started.
Outdoor Activities
Although we are talking about home activities, kids love the outdoors and we thought we’d include a few things that you can easily do in the backyard or the neighborhood park.
Explore the outdoors
Humans have a natural affinity for nature, and exploring the outdoors can be really rewarding. Whether you plan to go fishing or camping or just a stroll in the niighborhood, you can involve your child.
Through outdoor activities, you can introduce your little one to colors, plant and flower names, and your neighbors and how to greet them. If you are out in the park, you can even play some picnic games.
After all, these little things go a long way. Nonetheless, they may also make friends in spaces such as a children’s park. So dab some sunscreen and head out with your 4 year old for their next adventure!
Spend time taking care of plants
Gardening can be introduced as a fun activity to your toddler. Show them how seeds are sown, plants grown and how they can water plants each day.
Let them shoulder the duty of watering a few plants every day. This will help them inculcate good habits and also learn about plant names.
Indoor Activities
On days when the weather does not allow for spending time in the backyard or your little one does not feel like it, here are some simple indoor activities you may consider doing.
Try some baking and decorating.
While it is natural for some kids to get excited about baking muffins, choco chip cookies, and the likes, others may find decorating them once they are baked even more exciting.
You can ask them what they would like to bake and how they would like to contribute to the activity. Explain necessary instructions to the toddler and get going. This will help build on their ability to listen and respond to important information with patience.
Play Dress-Up
Kids love dressing up like adults. You can open your wardrobe to them (give them access to older clothes that you don’t much care about) and let them dress themselves up to look like mommy or daddy.
If they have accessories like earrings or other knickknacks, encourage them to mix and match. They will learn about colors and style.
This can also be a teaching moment to introduce them to gender sensitivities and break biases.
Storytelling
Children are fond storytellers, and they love to narrate them with a whole new level of detail and their perspectives. A publication by the Harvard university reads that one can encourage this by asking them to create their picture books and storybooks.
Group stories are another interesting exercise for engaging all the kids in your house. One individual can begin with the story, and everyone can add something to build upon it
The child will learn from the imagination and plot writing scenarios that other people in the game are offering while also exercising their brain to come up with something. Bilingual families can even do this in their mother tongue to make the activity even more engaging.
And finally, if all these creative storytelling ideas do not work, adding a dash of reding to your child’s schedule will help with their cognitive development. Reading preschool books about feelings helps four year olds express what they feeling. This will also aid in their social development.
Experiment with play
We firmly believe you know your little one better than anyone else, and you must only do things that they thoroughly love. One does not always need to try existing things but be creative and make do with whatever things they have at their place.
Encouraging experimentation in kids can go a long way in developing their confidence and abilities to deal with new things. In a publication by the Penn State University, play and music have been mentioned as two keys in nurturing learning in three and four year olds.
Little ones can be encouraged into experimentation through play. At the age that they are, toddlers have little to no fear of what will happen if an idea fails to work, owing to which they are utterly likely to try different ideas.
Children show creativity and inventiveness in developing and dealing with open-ended materials. Caregivers can provide little ones with books that talk about innovation, tools, and materials that can help them in the construction of structures.
Structures can be both large and small ones, and can include loose parts such as logs, sticks, and cardboard boxes. However, one must ensure that none of these parts have no sharp or prickly edges and that your little one is under adult supervision.
Wrap Up
Raising kids can be a demanding task. We hope you found some amazing activity ideas that you will sooner or later try with your kid. Please share your experiences and feedback with us in the comments section, and consider sharing these activity suggestions with other parents of four year olds.
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