04 Jun How to Keep a Toddler Busy While Homeschooling
When you have an active, curious toddler added to the homeschool mix, homeschooling can be a bit of a challenge. The first to eagerly arrive at the call for school to start, the first to get bored and use the back of the couch as a top rope of a boxing ring to launch off of onto his brothers…. homeschooling with a toddler has its moments!
How do you keep a toddler busy and engaged while still trying to focus on helping your older child complete their schoolwork?
The toddler years are usually between 1½ and 3 years old. Please keep in mind that you know your child best. Don’t use items that are too small for your child if they are prone to putting things in their mouth. If your child is still unable to excel at fine motor skills, don’t use things like clothespins which can pinch if used wrong.
Here are some ideas to try.
Scheduling Your Learning Time Around Your Toddler
When you have a little one, it’s important to consider their needs throughout the homeschool day. Toddlers need a lot of attention, touch, redirection, and engagement to fill their time.
Focus on their needs first in the homeschool day – read a book together, snuggle, and spend some quality time playing in order to fill up their “my parent loves me” tank before focusing on the other kids. It’s not a guaranteed solution, but a lot of times, it helps a young one be better able to be more self-reliant for a while instead of constantly needing your attention in the middle of math.
Make sure you build breaks into your homeschool day so that you can help refill that tank as needed, and help your toddler to get some energy out through active play. Go outside whenever possible so they can run around, play in a sandbox, climb and slide, or whatever you have access to.
If your toddler is still napping, use that time to do the homeschool work that needs the most focus or parental involvement. Use the quiet to get the things done without interruption.
Let Your Toddler Play “School”
Toddlers love to feel like they are big kids too. Although they are developmentally not ready for any official schoolwork – you can give them “schoolwork” to do alongside their siblings. It can be as simple as giving them scrap paper and a crayon, letting them scribble with pencil in a workbook, or using a wipe off book full of lots of bright colours – without intention that they actually *do* anything properly.
Another trick I’ve used over the years, is to just print out one extra copy of any worksheet or printable that I’m using with an older child, so the toddler has a copy too and feels like part of the team. I also used to give the toddler their very own pencil case with big fat crayons inside so they felt extra special.
If you use math manipulatives with your older child, like base-ten blocks, you can give some of the bigger ones to your toddler to play with, too. (Just be sure not to give them ones that are small enough to be swallowed.)
Setting up a cozy spot for your toddler to sit and read makes a safe (and potentially quiet) activity. Rotate the books regularly, so that is stays fresh and exciting. If you have the ability to make comments like “oh – I see a red dog! Can you find the red dog?” once in a while as they look through the books, it can help keep them engaged a little longer.
Get Creative
Toddlers love to to create things. So, use that to your advantage as a way to keep them busy!
Whiteboards make great places for a toddler to play. They can draw then wipe it off. For me, this was always a great, no-brainer kind of activity because my toddler would stay close by, practicing his fine motor skills, learning to draw shapes and letters, recognizing his colours, and discovering what happens when he mixes them together. As long as the markers stayed off the carpet and body, giving access to a white board is quick and mess-free activity.
Crayola offers special Mess Free markers that only work on special paper. It can be a good solution if your child does like to get a little creative outside the desired limits because there is nothing that shows up when they try it on themselves or the wall.
Make a craft bin with empty toilet paper rolls, cotton balls, the leftover bits of wrapping paper, popsicle sticks, pipe cleaners – whatever bits and bobs you can pull together. Remember to add in a glue stick and some scrap paper, and you can let your toddler get creative!
Sensory Play Time
Sensory play is an important (and fun!) part of toddlerhood. You can either have a dedicated sensory table or station or you can simply set up a plastic tablecloth, put out a cookie sheet, and let them go to it! This can be activities like:
- Playdough
- Noodles
- Water
- Oobleck
- Ice
- Sand
- Beans
Want more ideas? Check out this blog post with 37+ Fun Sensory Play Ideas. Although the post is specifically about the preschool years, most of the ideas are adaptable for toddlers as well.
Busy Bags / Tot Trays / Montessori Trays
A busy bag is a toddler-friendly ziploc bag with an activity inside. A tot tray is an activity placed on a tray for them to do. A Montessori Tray is the same idea, but instead focus on specific skills. The main goal of each is to provide engaging activities that your child chooses for themselves to use and play with.
If you have a group of homeschooling friends or people in your homeschooling community who also have toddlers, it can be a lot of fun to do a busy bag exchange.
Here’s how: Let’s say there are 10 people interested in participating. Each person picks an idea for their busy bag, then makes a bag of the same activity for everyone involved in the exchange. You all get together and pass them out so everyone ends up with 10 different busy bags. Busy bags can be really quite cheap and easy to put together while still offering a lot of learning outcomes.
Some busy bag activities hold kids’ attention longer than others, but if you put them all into a special bin or box just for them to use during school time, they can usually find something to keep themselves busy.
It’s the same thing with trays. Get a sturdy tray – ideally with handles so that your child can move it to a location they would like to work at – and fill it with various fun or practical skill activities.
A great way to keep these fun is to change it up frequently. Don’t use it every day and be sure to rotate the activities so they always seem new.
Assign Chores and Special Activities
Toddlers usually love to help and be useful, so why not use that for your advantage? Give an age-appropriate tasks to work on and then praise them for a job well-done. It’s a great way for a toddler to be entertained for a while helping around the house.
Here are some examples:
- Dusting: Give your toddler a dusting mitt or a Swiffer sweeper and set them on their task.
- A squirt bottle of water and a cloth: They can wash walls or windows! Just be prepared that things might be a bit wetter than you’d prefer.
- A small broom and dust pan: Since they are closer to the ground, they probably can see all the little pieces on the floor more easily than you can – give them the chance to sweep things up!
- Organizing the cutlery drawer: They can even empty the cutlery section of the dishwasher to help out (just remove any sharp or not-kid-safe items first!)
- Matching socks from the laundry: I always kept a pile of socks in the corner of my room and sometimes I’d dump it out on the living room floor to play match-the-socks with the toddler whenever the big ones were doing school.
- Cleaning up the Tupperware cupboard: If your container cupboard or drawer is like mine, it gets chaotic. Although they might not be the best of helpers in this situation, toddlers do love to play with plastic containers. Since they are safe and might be able to help you find new ways to clean up the cupboard, why not?
Set Aside Special Toys For School Time Only
Giving access to some toys only during school time makes those toys special and, since they aren’t available all the time, makes a toddler’s interest in them last longer.
These could be things like:
- Duplo
- Hot Wheels
- Train tracks
- Bristle blocks
- Play food
- Wooden blocks
- Play animal sets (Like Noah’s Ark or a Farm)
It really depends on what you have available in your house. Be sure not to include any battery operated noise-making toy that would distract your older children from their work.
Put the toys into bins and tuck them away during non-school times so that they aren’t available or visible otherwise.
Again, rotate the toys to keep them fresh and interesting.
Screen Time
In our house, we are very techie and our kids tend to start young. By 2 year olds, most of them had developed the skills and ability to turn on the computer and handle using a mouse, so when we need to distract our young ones to give us some quiet space, they were allowed to have a turn on the computer. We would give limited access to kid-safe websites like Starfall, PBSKids, and TVOKids. Give them kid-specific headphones (which always look incredibly oversized and adorable but also limit the volume) and let them have fun.
You can also use a tablet or iPad with a variety of early learning apps like:
There are lots of educational tv shows that you can put on for them as well. Look for ones that they will like but also can sneak in some learning – like NumberBlocks. Honestly, though, if it gives you a short span of time to focus on lessons with your older child – it’s okay if it’s not as intentionally educational as you would like. Engaging is good enough.
My toddlers all stopped napping around 1½ years old, which meant I often had cranky mid-afternoon kidlets. I would put on a gentle movie – for us that was Curious George or Wall-E – so that they could sort of zone out and rest for a bit. That gave me the ability to do other things – like try to finish up math with an older child.
The Main Keys to Keeping a Toddler Busy While Homeschooling
The big take away from all this is that the best way to keep a toddler busy during homeschool time is to provide a variety of engaging and interesting activities that they are able to do mostly independently once you’ve set them up. And then to rotate those activities so they aren’t bored.
Remember to break up the day so they can be as active as they need to be – even if that means your older student brings their schoolwork outside with you while the toddler runs in the yard and screams.
It’s about making it work for everyone in a way doesn’t leave you completely exhausted and burnt out – while still enjoying your children and the homeschooling experience.
This post was originally published in 2016 and has been updated in 2024.
Lisa Marie Fletcher is a mom of 5 with 15+ years of homeschooling experience. She started The Canadian Homeschooler in 2010 as a way to support the homeschooling community in Canada.