Just a few days back we talked about games to play with babies that are in between 0 and 6 months, today we are going a step further and see how these games change when your baby enters his 6 to 12 month old age. The main take away here is that now your baby is a little bit older and that means that he will look for different stimulus and exercises.
The fascinating thing about this age is that babies don’t need elaborated toys to be entertained but they mainly need your presence. You can find different way to play with them with common objects you find in your house.
With that being said, in the next paragraphs I will propose a series of games you can play with your 6 to 12 months old baby and spend great days together!
1. Sound bottles
Study them, manipulate, shake or roll them. Easy and instructive, the sound bottles are the perfect playmates for your baby and they are super easy to build!
Take small plastic bottles, like the ones you usually find for fruit juice. Then simply empty and clean them.
Once the bottles are perfectly dry, fill them for less than the half of their capacity with dried legumes such as beans or lentils, sand, rice, pebbles or everything that it’s small and make noise if shaked.
Close the bottle, if you want to be sure, use hot glue before closing the lid.
Let your baby play, shake and discover different sounds!
2. The fabric box
All you need is a box or a bag containing types of fabrics, dimensions and colours: cotton, silk, felt, chenille, satin, tissue, wool, jute, velvet, jeans, pile flannel and others.
This game aims at manipulate and discover tactile sensations, your baby will take a piece of fabric per time, she will look, touch and maybe taste it. To increase the level and keep the game always interesting, change fabrics time to time or you can also play this game blindfolded the baby to increase tactile stimulus.
3. Hide and seek
It’s been months since you started hiding yourself behind your hands, and yet you have also run miles and miles within your apartment just to hide behind a door, your sofa or under the kitchen table. I get you! You might be tired of all this long and tiring playing sessions of hide and seek. There is a solution!
Show a small object to your baby, then hide it under a pillow or something similar.
Ask to your baby “Where is (object name) hidden?”, then show her how you have found it. After a while your baby will start looking herself for this object and you can play with her at hide and seek comfortably seated.
This game becomes more and more engaging once your baby starts crawling or walking!
4. Put your hat on
To play this game you will need a baseball cap.
Put your cap on and get closer to your baby. Taken by curiosity, she will probably try to remove it (and throw it on the ground).
Then put the cap on her head, giving to the baby the time to find it and throw it away again. Once she has mastered it try to teach her how to put the cap on herself, this will be even more fun!
5. Funny voices
Baby’s curiosity gets stimulated by sound and voice since their early days. They learn how to recognize your tone of voice and so different sounds around them.
Take the cardboard roll of kitchen paper or toilet paper and talk through it. Your voice will sound different and your baby will be enchanted by it. You can also help your baby to try that by herself and see her reaction!
6. Unboxing time
You will have noticed that anytime someone gives your baby a gift, she is more interested in scrapping and unwrapping the box than in its content. Let’s be honest it’s easy to fall for that: these packages have bright colours, they make a lot of sound when unwrap them.
With that in mind, nothing is more funny and easy to do than creating small gifts for your baby, using some old packing paper you have left from Christmas or your birthday (newspapers will make it as well) and wrap everything with nice ribbons on top!
Guess who is going to pick up all the paper pieces left on the ground in the end? Right, but keep in mind that your baby will have a lot of fun!
