What you need
- Small toy figures, animals or vehicles
What to do
- When you and your toddler are playing with toy people (or animals), make up a story about going shopping.
- Use your toddler’s favourite type of shop to keep them engaged.
- Make a pretend till area and stand one toy in front of the till, and one behind.
- Say to your toddler, “Oh look, that person is buying something, they’re in the queue.”
- Then find another person and stand them behind the person in the queue.
- Repeat this until there are a few people lined up.
- Set up another till and pop a toy behind the till. Repeat what you did before.
- When your toddler has seen this happen a few times, they might start to add people to a queue, too.
- If your toddler loses interest in creating queues, you can capture their attention again by pretending that one person has finished at the till.
- The first person in the queue can be moved away and all the others moved forwards. Your toddler might have ideas to keep the game going with different queues; let them lead the adventure if they want to!
Good to know
Adapt the game to what your toddler’s interested in – it could be cars in a traffic jam, elephants getting a drink, boats sailing in the sea – anything at all.