Games for 2-Year-Old Children

Play Dough

• Enjoying play dough can be as easy as pounding a lump of play dough flat or as complex as creating imaginative worlds. Find recipes for making play dough online, and then have your child help stir the play dough and decide on colors. When the play dough is ready, show your child how to roll the dough flat using a rolling pin. Give her pasta shells, keys or forks--any small thing--to make patterns in the dough. Children enjoy pressing plastic cookie cutters into the play dough to create shapes and animals. Show your child how to roll out snakes. With child-safe scissors, she can snip the play dough snake into pieces.

Singing Games

• Singing games include movement with the music. Do the “Hokey Pokey” with your 2-year-old. Children use their whole bodies and minds with this action song, putting their right legs in (then the left legs, and so on), clapping and turning all about. For less-active singing games, try "Two little Blackbirds" and “The Wheels on the Bus.” Add hand movements to each verse, and your child will soon join in. The repetition in these singing games helps your child learn the words and master the moves.

Hide and Seek

• Small children beg to play this classic game. In its simplest form, one player (the adult) counts to 10, while the other player (the child) hides. The adult searches for the child, and when he is found, the game starts over. Teach your child to count to 10 so that he can look for you. Hide stuffed animals around the house for the child to find. For more than one child, try the variant called “Sardines.” One child hides, and all the others seek him. As each player finds the hidden one, he joins him in the hiding place, waiting for the others to find them.