Busy Bag for Toddlers

I have a niece who is 2 1/2 years old.  She is the smartest kid I know.  And I would know, I teach kindergarten so I see a lot of kids all of the time.  She's like most kids, busy all of the time and activities only keep her attention for short periods of time before she tires and is looking for the next thing.  It's part of being 2 1/2.  Her stamina (a teaching term) for activities is 15 minutes if you're really lucky.  I mean really lucky, unless you're in her swimming pool, swimming pools are NOT included in the stamina calculation. 

My sister-in-law keeps very busy with my niece and 3 month old nephew.  If you've ever had kids I'm sure you're aware that like to have your attention all of the time even when it's not their turn.  I found a couple of neat solutions to keeping your toddler busy while perusing Pinterest one evening.  I pinned the idea onto my Niece/Nephew board with the idea of going back later and looking at my pin.  Boy am I glad I did.  I went to a blog of a mother of several young children who decided to have a busy bag swap.  I was curious as I'd never heard of a busy bag.  Busy bags are small activities that can be performed by your young child independently and (hopefully) keep them busy for 10-15 minutes while you get a bite to eat, feed the baby, grab a quick shower, need to wait in a waiting room, attend church without drawing too much undue attention to yourselves and the list goes on and on.  What this mom did was have all of her friends agree to come to her busy bag swap (she invited 20 friends) and her friends each brought 20 of the same busy bag activities and then the moms all traded their various busy bags so when they left they had 20 different busy bags that could hopefully entertain their children in various times of need.  I wasn't so interested in the swap idea but I was very interested in the different activities they'd made for their busy bags. 

For my first idea I decided to make an easy activity for my niece.  It's an activity board with magnets.  All I needed was some pom-poms, magnets and metal burner covers for the stove. 

I started by gluing large and medium sized pom-poms onto the magnets with hot-glue.  I used a fair amount of glue because I figured kids are hard on things. 

After gluing the pom-poms on I was done!  I put 26 pom-poms on the magnetic burner cover.  A child can manipulate the different pom-poms on the cover to make pictures or get in some fine motor skill practice.  Super easy and took me all of 10 minutes to make.  I actually made two; one for my niece and one for a friend's little boy at school.

Of course the true test of how busy this keeps a kid will be when I give it to my niece.