5 fabulous Christmas activities for your baby and toddler’s development.

The first Christmas with your new baby is so special! It’s the perfect opportunity to start family traditions that will last a lifetime. And best of all, the festive play you do with your baby or toddler doesn’t just create fabulous memories it helps build their brain, body and future learning skills!  

Play is how babies and toddlers explore their world and grow. Christmas play is no different - with a little thought, you can make it part of the sparkly build-up to the big day AND support their development at the same time!

Here are five festive activities to enjoy with your baby or toddler this holiday season!

Activity 1: Make a Keepsake Plate for Santa

Create a family tradition that grows with your child by decorating a plate for Santa’s treats. Use non-toxic ceramic paints to design a plate with your baby or toddler. They can stamp their handprint or paint simple shapes, while you or an older sibling add the final festive touches. Bake the plate to set the design, and bring it out every year for Santa’s cookies and carrots for the reindeer. Remember if it’s not perfect, that’s half the charm!

How this helps development:

For your baby or toddler, it’s a sensory explosion of learning! They’ll be developing their senses with the feel of the paint against their hands and feet, exploring the texture of the paint as well as the marks it makes. Incidentally, they’ll be learning about colour as well. They'll be developing their creativity and self-expression and their fine and gross motor control. The balance that’s needed to stand on one foot and put it into paint and then not step somewhere else other than where they are meant to step also requires a huge amount of focus and concentration!

Remember that your baby learns most through play and exploration, so it’s not necessarily all about getting the perfect handprint, but more about the exploration and enquiry. 

Activity 2 - Festive Water Play

Water play is always a favourite, but at this time of year, you might want to make it have a festive feel.

For toddlers grab some kitchen equipment and pop it into a bucket or plastic box, one that has lowish sides so that your toddler can reach in and explore the water. NEVER leave your toddler alone with water, even if it’s just a small amount. Or, you could run a bath and let your baby or toddler sit in the water. Add some green or red food colouring as well as the sieve, spoons, funnel, Tupperware, clean recycling materials, etc and let your baby explore pouring and filling. You might want to add some plastic baubles to add some festive fun and other plastic ornaments that are child-friendly and safe for your baby to play with.

Your toddler will love to explore the water, encourage them to look at the things that float and sink. Encourage them to try pouring and filling. Use language that describes what they’re doing - describe the look, feel, textures, etc of the things that they are playing with - and you have turned a fun activity into a language development fest!

For younger children, fill a strong ziplock bag with coloured water, sparkles and eco-friendly glitter, and you might also be able to add some snowflakes/snowmen/Father Christmas/tree shapes cut from old recycling lids etc and add them to the bag. Seal the bag well to ensure that the water can’t get out and pop your baby on their tummy to let them explore and investigate how the content of the bag moves when they pat it.

You’ll be developing their core muscles, their language as you chat to them about what they’re doing, their hand-eye coordination, their problem-solving and thinking brain as well as developing their ability to track moving objects with their eyes.

Activity 3 - Reach and Grab Christmas Edition

Interactive mobiles and hanging ornaments! There’s nothing more exciting than something at your own height that you are allowed to investigate when you are a tiny person! And things that hang are just asking to be investigated, particularly if they are full of interesting textures and sounds!

Your dining room or kitchen table, or the back of a chair is the perfect place to hang interesting things for your baby to investigate. Tie different textured items onto ribbons and let your baby explore - from pinecones to bells, from plastic baubles to plastic candy canes, it doesn’t really matter what it is so long as it’s safe for your baby to explore, has some different textures, ideally makes sounds (like bells) and is visually interesting.

If your baby is tiny, they’ll be able to lie underneath them and explore. That’s going to develop their sensory skills, their sight, their hearing, and their visual tracking (which is the beginning of reading), it’s going to encourage them to stretch out to reach, which will develop their core muscles and encourage their fine motor control as they explore the feel of the things. It will also develop their enquiry skills, focus, concentration and attention.

If your child is sitting, this is a lovely activity that will encourage them to sit for longer and encourage them to reach and move in to get to the hanging things, which in turn will develop their core muscles and gross motor skills which are all needed for crawling. Being able to reach for different objects may well encourage them to cross the midline which is a skill they need to develop to be able to complete everyday activities.

If your baby is walking, these hanging things will make a wonderful adventure to explore on foot.

Activity 4 - Christmas Story and Song box

What about making a learning adventure by teaching your baby all those fab Christmas songs and stories? You could make a Christmas song and story box.

It’s really simple to do and something you might keep and bring out each year. Find a Tupperware or box that you can put things in. Then think of all the Christmas songs you know and try to find (or make) Christmas props that will help you with the songs, eg a plastic snowman for Frosty the Snowman, or a baby Jesus for Away in a Manger etc.

You can look through the decorations you have, or look in a charity shops for old Christmas decorations, or use Christmas cards, or even crack out the pens and draw some things to use. Pop these into your box and add some instruments like a drum or bells, tambourine or even a shaker bottle full of bells or peas to aid the singing.

Add a bit of tinsel onto the box and perhaps make tinsel hats, crowns, or wings to add a bit of dressing up to the occasion and then have a lovely sing song!

You could add a Christmas story or two to the box to make it into a Christmas experience box. It’s a great way to teach your baby new songs and stories and the props will act as a prompt to remind you of the songs!

Singing is so good for your baby’s development, even before THEY can sing, they are gaining from the rhythm and rhyme. Children surrounded by music are found to be better at maths later on in life, and songs provide children with an opportunity to learn language in context. Singing reduces your baby’s stress levels (and yours) and lowers blood pressure, it improves sleep quality, mood and mental alertness as well as developing your child’s memory. Singing is a workout for the brain and great for babies (and parents) of all ages!

Stories are always a fabulous excuse for a snuggle, making them a chance to develop your baby’s emotional skills and security.  They also give your baby a chance to hear new language in context and look at the pictures.

If you’ve got a tiny baby, why not grab a black marker pen and a white piece of card and make a black and white book of your own based on the Christmas theme - your baby won’t worry if you are not fab at drawing, but they’ll LOVE the chance to snuggle in and study the simple lines and shapes on a page (and it will make a special keepsake, your baby's first Christmas book made by you!)

Activity 5- Christmas balance challenge

Balance activities are great for babies and toddlers on the move. You can use easy-to-remove tape on the floor to make Christmas (or other) simple shapes to encourage your baby to crawl, walk or ride on…. It might be a simple Christmas tree or a snowman shape - just mark it out on the floor and encourage your baby to follow the lines - it’s harder for them than you might think! Your baby will find the balance needed to follow the lines a real challenge, whether they are crawling or walking. This helps them develop their gross motor control, also their focus, attention, and concentration.

Want to make it more challenging? Ask them to walk on every line (depending on their age) they’ll need to hold in their head which lines they have already been on and which ones they still have to do. It will develop their working memory. You might ask them to walk, hop, run, crawl along the lines, developing their flexibility, and perseverance as they might well fall off the lines and have to start again!

It’s such a simple activity, but one that can be extended by the challenges that you add to it. 

Another balance activity - Make a bauble obstacle course. Put some toilet or kitchen roll tubes spaced out around the room. Place a bell or bauble on top of each one. Get your toddler to move between the tubes without knocking off the baubles. They could do this walking, jumping or even slithering as they get more adventurous.

Your tiny baby might just lie on their tummies and be able to look and reach for them and knock them over.

Both ways, you are giving your baby amazing learning and development opportunities. 

Whatever you choose to do, it’s not really about the Christmas activities, (although, those are a whole heap of fun), it’s more about what your baby is learning from the things that you are doing. Knowing what to do can be a real challenge and that’s where the Oliiki programme comes in. It’s full of simple activities like the ones above for you to do with your bump baby or toddler from conception to two.

We show you what your baby learns from the play you’re doing and how it’s helping their development. That helps your baby, but it also helps you, because you realise quite how amazing you are by doing these seemingly simple activities!

You see, for your baby, simple is never simple and Oliiki shows you why! Once you’ve had a play with the activities in this blog, download our 7-day free trial and find the other 1000+ activities that are waiting for you and your baby to explore!