It’s no secret that infants develop at astounding rates during their first year of life. It can feel like new milestones are constantly appearing! You can support this rapid development by offering stimulating activities for infants in your daycare.

Parents often seek daycares that not only offer a safe and nurturing environment but also provide a rich array of activities for infants that encourage developmental progress. In a daycare, play-based day care activities are essential, as infants learn significantly through play. Crafting a routine filled with various activities for infants enables them to enhance their movement, communication, socialization, and overall understanding of their surroundings.

The beauty of play-based day care activities lies in their flexibility and minimal requirement for specialized equipment or supplies. Such activities can be easily tailored to suit each infant’s unique developmental pace and the daycare’s setting, ensuring that every child gets the opportunity to grow and learn effectively, making the most out of their early childhood experiences.

4 Daycare Friendly Sensory Activities for Infants

Sensory activities for infants encourage listening skills, visual tracking, touching, and feeling. Note: food and dietary needs vary greatly for infants, so any meals or if you plan sensory activities that include tasting, be sure to ask parents first.

1. Mirror, Mirror

Provide a baby-safe mirror and show the baby their reflection. Let them point, coo, or touch the mirror. Ask questions like, “Who is that?” or “Where’s Baby?” (using Baby’s name, of course). You can also put simple toys (dog, cat, etc.) in front of the mirror and ask similar questions. 

Other activities to do with mirrors include making funny faces and encouraging the infant to mimic you, naming body parts (Baby’s eyes, Baby’s nose, etc.), or playing simple games like “Peek-A-Boo.”

Developmental benefits: Mirror play introduces self-awareness, which will grow into an important social and emotional skill. Watching reflections can help babies learn to focus their eyes and track objects. The conversations you have during mirror play will aid in language development. And last but not least, mirror play is a great tool for encouraging tummy time.

Materials needed: Baby-safe mirror.

2. Repeat After Me

Babies make all kinds of coos, giggles, and noises. When an infant is in a happy mood, try repeating after them and allow them to delight in the sounds.

Developmental benefits: When you repeat a baby’s sounds, you’re introducing two-way communication. You’re also teaching speech patterns and building a foundation for future words. Repeating expressions can also be a great social and emotional activity for infants.

Materials needed: None.

3. Making Music

There are many ways to incorporate music into babies’ days. You can sing to them or play classical music in the background during other activities.

Provide safe, supervised time with rattles or children’s instruments like maracas, egg shakers, tambourines, xylophones, rain sticks, handbells, and hand drums. Let them mimic your movements with the instruments or shake, rattle, and roll at their own pace.

Developmental benefits: Music for babies can help boost cognitive and emotional growth, language development, motor skills, caregiver bonding, and more.

Materials needed: Music player and/or baby-safe musical instruments.

4. Texture Time

Sensory experiences are an essential learning tool in early childhood, and introducing textures to babies can be an easy way to bring them into your daycare. You can use large swatches of different types of fabric to make texture mats. You can also tie smaller fabric scraps around a hula hoop to place near babies during tummy time. Try a variety of fabrics, such as corduroy, denim, velvet, wool, and fleece. 

Developmental benefits: Tactile play, such as feeling various textures, can support babies’ fine motor skills, language development, and cognitive development.

Materials needed: Fabric scraps in various textures.

3 Fun Daycare Activities for Gross Motor Skill Development

Gross motor skills are activities that involve large muscles and the whole body. Gross motor activities for infants include sitting, standing, crawling, lifting, throwing, kicking, rolling, and eventually walking as they transition into toddlerhood. Helping infants develop gross-motor skills is an important role for daycare providers.

1. Active Singing

We can’t stress enough how important music is, and how easily it is to weave into your routine. Sit down at their level and show them the motions to active children’s songs such as:

• Row, Row, Row Your Boat
• If You’re Happy and You Know It
• Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes
• The Wheels on the Bus

Eventually, they will start to repeat the motions which will engage different muscles.

Developmental benefits: Singing with motions can help expand babies’ cognitive, social, and emotional skills. It can also boost gross motor skills, creativity, and caregiver bonding.

Materials needed: None.

2. Follow the Leader

Play a simple game of Follow the Leader with babies by encouraging them to copy you. Stretch your arms above your head and see if they will repeat the action. Clap your hands, put your hands on your head, bang the floor, or tap your knees. With older infants who are more mobile, try standing up, sitting down, squatting, making kicking motions, or stomping your feet. In addition to strengthening gross motor skills, they will also be developing body awareness and memory skills.

Developmental benefits: Follow the Leader strengthens gross motor skills, body awareness, and social skills such as listening and following directions. 

Materials needed: None.

3. Obstacle Course

If you have older infants that crawl, scoot, and move around independently, create a safe obstacle course. Items that you already have in your daycare for play or crafts work well for this. Foam or cardboard block towers make simple obstacles that they can crawl around. Use a pillow, a stuffed animal, or even a pool noodle to create an obstacle for the baby to climb over. You can add your texture mats to the obstacle court as well. If you don’t have a children’s tunnel, open both sides of a large box so the baby can crawl through it. You can even add streamers made of crepe paper on one end for a celebratory finish.

Developmental benefits: Along with gross motor skills, obstacle courses encourage balance, coordination, strength, problem-solving, and motor planning.

Materials needed: Large blocks, pillows, stuffed animals, tunnels, pool noodles, cardboard boxes, or other fun, baby-safe obstacles.

3 Daycare Activities for Fine Motor Skills

Fine motor skills involve the small muscles of the hands, and fine motor activities for infants involve a lot of grasping, picking up, dropping, and alternating items between their hands. Encouraging the development of fine motor skills now will make handling cutlery, brushing teeth, tying shoes, and writing easier in the future.

1. Tray of Toys

Set out a small tray with a few toys. Encourage your infants to reach for the toys, pick them up, and set them back down for a new toy. Use objects of different shapes and sizes, so they can figure out when they need to use two hands. Pick up a toy and offer a trade. Choosing and manipulating toys will require a lot of hand-eye coordination, which also encourages cognitive development.

Developmental benefits: This activity strengthens not only fine motor skills, but also hand-eye coordination and cognitive development.

Materials needed: Small, baby-safe tray, a few baby toys or safe household items.

2. Play Ball

Most infants love playing with balls, so keeping balls of different sizes and textures in your daycare is a good idea. You can encourage them to roll or drop the ball or toss it back and forth to you. Find a small container for them to drop the ball into and retrieve. Squishy balls will allow them to squeeze and manipulate the ball, working different muscles. Playing with balls is also an easy parallel play activity for older infants who can sit next to or across from each other.

Developmental benefits: Playing with balls boosts fine and gross motor skills, cognitive development, and social skills like sharing and turn-taking.

Materials needed: A variety of baby-safe balls.

3. Endless Tissue Box

Infants seem to love pulling tissues or baby wipes out of their containers. Give them their own version by taking an empty tissue box and filling it with fabric scraps. 

Developmental benefits: This activity strengthens cognitive development and fine motor skills  — specifically grasping.

Materials needed: Empty tissue box, several scraps of fabric.

3 Cognitive Daycare Activity Ideas

Cognitive activities for infants help develop memory, listening, language, thinking, understanding, and reasoning skills. At this age, almost every activity you do with infants helps develop their cognitive skills, but you can be intentional about choosing activities specifically for language and memory development.

1. Read-Aloud Time

The value of reading aloud to children of all ages cannot be overstated. Listening to books is imperative to helping children develop early literacy skills. Keep a diverse selection of books available. You can read short, fun books during storytime, or longer books during quiet time or before naps.

Developmental benefits: Books support cognitive, social, and emotional development, as well as caregiver bonding. They boost language skills, especially vocabulary, and introduce creativity and imagination.

Materials needed: Children’s books.

2. Hide and Find

A simple version of a hide and find game is to mostly hide a toy or object under a blanket or behind you, or a piece of furniture. Infants will likely be working out a mental recreation of the full object and will have to determine how to reach it.

Developmental benefits: Hide and FInd introduces object permanence, which can help with separation anxiety. It can also strengthen visual tracking, memory development, and hand-eye coordination.

Materials needed: Any toy or baby-safe household object.

3. Hide and Find Memory Game

Another hide and find game is to use the traditional “item under 3 cups” game. Start simply, by placing the item under one cup and letting the child pick it up. You can increase to two and three cups as they are ready, and eventually, start sliding the cups around slowly to encourage visual tracking and memory. Tell them what you are doing during the process, “I am putting the blue ball under the red cup” to boost listening and understanding.

Developmental benefits: This game has similar developmental benefits to traditional Hide and Find, but strengthens the skills further.

Materials needed: Three cups and one small object.

Foster Infant Development with Engaging Daycare Activities and Wonderschool

As a daycare provider, you play an important role in the safety and development of the infants in your care. Creating an environment where they can be mentally and physically stimulated through fun, engaging, and beneficial activities is crucial.

To aid you in providing a quality learning environment for infants of all stages of development, Wonderschool offers resources for daycare providers and preschools to give child-centered and growth-minded care. Quality, early education options should be available in every neighborhood, and our mission is to help you create that space for the families in your community.

If you are looking to start a child care program or looking to simplify and grow a current program, reach out to us today.