Sometimes I wonder… How do we teach our kids (and toddlers at that!) the value of serving and giving back to their community?
In our family we truly feel that a passion for helping and serving others is one of the most important things we’re going to teach our children. Yet finding tangible ways for a two-and-a-half-year-old to do that can feel like quite a challenge (insert space for random tantrum here).
But I’m going to let you in on a little secret. When it comes to toddlers, the simpler and quicker we can make the exercise – the more impactful it’s going to be for them!
And you know what? I had to remind myself of this very fact about 30,000 times when I was coming up with an activity for the Emmett and I to do together this summer. It’s easy to make service feel like it ‘should’ be a giant task with an immense amount of impact. But do you know what’s more important than that?
That we show up and do it. And that we find small ways to give back to our local community, and do it together as a family.
So, here’s what our toddler-friendly summer project looked like: we made a toy-share bin in the sandbox of our local park, and stocked it with some of Emmett’s favourite sand toys!
We took a trip to the store together, explained to Emmett several times that we weren’t buying toys for him specifically, but that we were buying toys for everyone at the park to play with so we could all make friends. And he got really excited about it!
Here’s how we put the bin together:
- We bought a plastic drink tub to hold all the toys (so it would be rain and sand proof)
- We stocked the bin with buckets, molds, diggers, scrapers and sifters of every colour, shape and size
- We wrote a message on the outside of the bin so that everyone at the park would know what it’s for. Ours said: “Share a Toy, Make a Friend” and then we included the name of the park on the back.
We put the whole bin together with supplies from our local dollar store, and it cost less than $25 and took just over an hour to complete from start to finish. A toddler-friendly timeline, and a mommy-friendly budget.
And you know what? Watching Em walk into the sandbox with the bin, choose a corner to put it in, and then deliver some of the shovels and buckets to the kids playing in the sand was worth every penny.
So if this whole idea gets your creativity flowing, and you’re looking for fabulous easy ways to give back locally with your family, you NEED to check out Local Love. They send out the most fabulous weekly newsletter called The Good News Letter that has three things in it each week: something to inspire, something to learn, and something to try. You can sign up for the newsletter HERE, and I promise it’ll be the best thing you get in your inbox every week. It’s absolutely the inspiration we need to keep our family engaged in our community, and it makes us proud to be Torontonians.
Note: I have partnered with YMC and Local Love to create this content, and have received compensation for this post. All opinions are of course my own!
