With two toddlers and a baby on the way, hubby and I won’t be going out for New Year’s Eve! Instead we’ll be enjoying the day at home with our New Year’s Eve toddler activities and cherishing the family time! Many people don’t know what they can do with toddlers or young children to celebrate New Year’s but there are lots of things to fill your day with excitement without having to go out to a party!
1) Art & Crafts
I love doing arts and crafts with the little ones so what better way to start our day than with some craft New Year’s Eve toddler activities!?! With LA being 3 1/2 now and Addy almost 2 they are really loving it, too! There are several activities that we’ll be completing throughout the day.
Make a Goal Tree – First, explain the New Year holiday to your children. Let them know all about resolutions and or/goals (however you view it) and let them know it can be fun! Create a tree out of construction paper, or even make a quick trip to a craft store…being that it’s right after Christmas I’m sure you can find a tree type decoration to hang on clearance! Cut out various shapes to write on (this year we’ll be using squares, diamonds, rectangles, circles, etc since we are working on learning shapes) and ask your child what they want to accomplish in the coming year. Let them have fun with it…if it’s silly, go with it! After the tree is complete, in the coming months you can work with them to complete their goals!
Crowns – who doesn’t want to wear a crown on New Year’s!? Kids love decorating and wearing their own crowns! We usually look online for crown printables to cut out and decorate! They can wear the crowns in your celebration later on (more ideas on that later! Keep reading!). We use glitter, cut out foam pieces from the craft store, crayons and stickers!
Confetti! Every celebration needs confetti! The kids will love sitting down with construction paper and a hole punch! There are also many, many other ways to make it: you can cut vertical strips into tissue paper and then cut it into small pieces horizontally…you can also use Christmas tinsel (seen above) and cut it into small pieces! Again, perfect time to run to the store for tissue paper and tinsel as it’s on clearance from Christmas!
Photo Courtesy of RepeatCrafterMe.com
2) Prepare Dessert!
In order to continue our shapes theme, we plan on making sugar cookies (round in shape) and decorating them with frosting as clocks striking midnight! We decorated cookies on Christmas Eve and the little ones had a ball so we’ll do it again for New Year’s! The cookies will also (hopefully) have confetti inside as a nice surprise! I got this idea from the New Years Confetti Clock Cookies from Sarah at the Repeat Crafter Me blog.
3) Celebration Dinner with Confetti
We’ll be having our New Year’s Dinner around the typical dinner time: 5-6pm. It will have a shape theme of circles to represent clocks! We’ll start with a veggie/fruit “clock” appetizer. We’ll use a large round serving plate and add pickles, cut tomatoes, cucumbers, banana chips, and any other round veggies and fruits and we’ll place them around the edges where the numbers on clocks would typically be. We’ll then add carrot sticks for the clock hands. We’ll let each child grab their favorites and then let them recreate a clock on a small appetizer plate of their own! We’ll continue our shapes theme and using circles and have pizza as the main course and our clock cookies for dessert! Don’t forget to decorate the table with some of your homemade confetti and some party horns for fun!
4) And the Clock Strikes….Eight!?
Since we won’t be allowing our toddlers to stay up past midnight to celebrate, we’ll have an early celebration. When the clock strikes eight o’clock our New Year’s Eve toddler activities will end with the final celebration of the night! We’ll have small glasses of Sparkling Grape Juice to toast, we’ll have leis around our necks, party horns to blow and confetti to throw! We’ll be playing toddler friendly dance songs and we’ll dance, dance, dance for a fun ending to our night!
5) Time for Mama and Daddy
After the final toddler celebration of the night, put the kids to bed with a sweet nighttime story and then you have a few hours of mama and daddy time before kissing your special love when the clock really does strike midnight! Perfect ending to the perfect day!
What ideas do you have for New Year’s Eve Toddler Activities?
The post Celebrate with New Year’s Eve Toddler Activities appeared first on Mama On a Green Mission.