Fun and creative activities to stimulate your toddler every day of the year The Toddler's Busy Book contains 365 screen-free activities for one-and-a-half- to three-year-olds using things found around the home. It shows parents and daycare providers how to: Prevent boredom during the longest stretches of rainy days with ideas for indoor play, kitchen activities, and arts and crafts projects. Stimulate your child's natural curiosity with entertaining math, language, and motor-skills activities. Encourage your child's physical, mental, and emotional growth with fun music, food, water, and outdoor activities. Celebrate holidays and other occasions with special projects and activities. Keep toddlers occupied during long car trips or crosstown errands. The Toddler's Busy Book is written with warmth and sprinkled with humor and insight. It should be required reading for anyone raising or teaching toddlers. —Help children learn to have fun in the kitchen making fruit popsicles, zoo sandwiches, “mud balls” (using peanut butter and honey), “ants on a log” (using celery, peanut butter and raisins), and peanut butter sculptures (they’re fun to make and fun to eat). —Get your child started with music and rhythm by making a coffee can drum, a kazoo (starting with an empty toilet paper roll), or inviting your child to “strum” on corrugated cardboard with a spoon,  —Teach your child about colors, numbers, letters and body parts: cut an apple open and count the seeds—then eat the apple slices, or play the color game in the supermarket (identifying fruits and vegetables of different colors), or ask your child to point to different body parts as you name them, or pour sand into a pie plate and ask your child to draw letters in the sand. —Celebrate holidays and birthdays with special projects and activities by making Halloween face paint, a Thanksgiving Turkey (starting with a small paper plate), a “Jack o’ Orange, a “stars and stripes” sponge painting, a shamrock necklace, a birthday memory book, valentine cookies, or a Rudolph sandwich. —Make car trips and walks around the block more fun by teaching your child nursery rhymes and finger plays, including “Five Little Monkeys” (use fingers to indicate the number of monkeys), or recite “Walking Through the Jungle” while taking a walk and miming the actions; or, recite a familiar nursery rhyme and pause when you come to the rhyming word; see if your child can fill in the blank. —Teach your child practical skills like picking up all the stuffed animals (or toys) on the floor and throwing them into a laundry basket (you can say, “Let’s play “basket bear!”) or washing vegetables (it’s like washing your hands), or by washing the floor with a sponge and soapy water in a bucket (which turns your child into your helper). —Lure your child to bed at night with a “jungle safari” which involves searching for stuffed animals in the bedroom with