Best Books to Find Fun Activities for Your Children

It’s not always easy knowing what to do with your children every day. Sometimes you just need some fun ideas. This is where books come in. The books listed below are activity books for 2 year olds, activity books for 4 year olds, even activity books for 5th graders.

To be clear, when I say activity books, I mean books that are full of fun activities to do with your child. I am not referring to the books that are basically full of worksheets. I’m trying to provide you with fun, educational activities you can do with your child.

The First Year

1. Building Baby's Brain

This short, simple guide covers birth through the first five year. I actually really appreciate it because it isn’t long and overwhelming. It keeps the content sweet, simple, and accessible.

2. Experimenting with Babies

We received this book as a gift and I immediately loved it. It’s full of fun, simple experiments to do with your baby in their first year of life (and a little longer). Plus because they are experiments with your baby, it is packed full of developmental anecdotes about why your baby responds a certain way.

3. Monthly Curriculum (link to blog coming Spring, 2022)

I would be remiss of course if I didn’t mention my own curriculum work (link to curricula coming February, 2022). I have created activities for each month of the year for you to do with your infant. They are low or minimal materials and there are 5 activities for each week.

The Early Years

1. Educating Your Preschooler

My Educating Your Preschooler book is full of an entire month of activities. It’s build for parents who have their children at home for the full month, so it’s packed with activities to do every day for a full month.

2. Experimenting with Kids

The sequel to Experimenting with Babies, Experimenting with Kids covers experiments for children ages two through five. Again, it’s activities that have to do with your child’s development, so there is always a hypothesis and then an explanation as to why that’s the thought. Fun and educational.

3. Monthly Activities (link to blog coming Spring, 2022)

I have created a curriculum for each month of the year for 2, 3, 4, and 5-year-olds (link to curriculum coming April, 2022). Each week in the month has 5 activities. These are good for parents who work full time or their children are in school full time, as it offers minimal preparation and frequently uses items that are on hand.

4. Wonderplay Too

This book was one of the first in my library of activity books. It has a number of simple activities for different developmental needs (blocks vs dramatic play for example). It uses a lot of recyclable materials and the activities range from incredibly simple to reasonably complex.