Tuff Tray

50+ Tuff Tray Ideas for Toddlers & Kids (Indoor & Outdoor Play)

Discover 50+ easy Tuff tray ideas for toddlers, preschoolers and KS1 children. From messy play and ice activities to learning and small world setups, these simple ideas keep kids engaged at home.

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Monster Truck Ice Play Activity

My son has always been mad about anything with four wheels, with monster trucks being his absolute favourite.

While I mostly leave him to play with these imaginatively, I do love trying to come up with bigger activities where his siblings can get involved too, and we can keep playtime fun and engaging.

How to Set Up This Monster Truck Ice Play Activity The night before:

This...

Times table grid tuff tray activity

My children are learning about their times tables at the moment, so I have been trying to come up with some more creative ways to teach them.

Today I decided to get out the tuff tray and whiteboard pens and draw up a times table grid. For some reason, the tuff tray seems to add an extra bit of fun to any activity. I could have just drawn this out on a piece of paper, but my daughter...

picture of a Letter finding activity for kids

Learning about lower case letters

If your little ones are learning about letters, we have the perfect activity for you!

For this activity, I got some pieces of A5 paper and in the centre, I wrote the letter I wanted my children to find, for example ‘a’ . I made sure I made the central letter quite large, so it stood out. Then around the rest of the paper I wrote the letter again several times, plus a few other letters....

Food sorting activity

We have been learning about healthy and unhealthy foods, so today I set up a tuff tray to help my little one learn through play .

I got two pieces of paper and wrote ‘healthy’ on one and ‘unhealthy’ on the other, and then I put these sheets onto the tuff tray.

Then I got a good selection of our play food and set that on the tray too. I asked my daughter if she could put all...

picture of Disney Frozen activity for kids

Frozen Themed Ice Play Activity

As many of our regular readers will know, my two little ones LOVE ice play! So will the weather being so nice we have been doing lots more of it!

My daughter loves the Disney Frozen film, so we decided to combine one of our favourite activity ideas with our favourite characters.

I tried to make this one a bit different by freezing the characters in bigger Tupperware...

picture of Number matching maths tuff tray activity for kids

Match the number to the Word activity

My children are loving maths activities at the moment, so we have been making some simple maths tuff trays. For this one, all I did was write the numbers 1-10 in both numerical and word form. Then I asked my children to draw a line to match up the words and numbers. This taught my children so many skills, like number and word recognition, plus they had lots of fun doing it.

If you...

Fish adding and taking away tuff tray

My daughter is really loving maths at the moment and asked me if I could write her some sums for when she came home from school.

I decided to make this a bit more fun by using fish instead of numbers. By using an object instead of a number it also meant she needed to practice her counting skills.

My drawing skills aren’t fantastic so fish seemed to be an easy to thing to...

picture of Times table grid 1 to 12 tuff tray activity for kids

Times table grid 1-12

My son loves learning his times tables at the moment, so I thought I would make him a times table grid for him to fill in.

What you need for this activity

⬛️ Tuff tray or paper 🖊️ pens suitable to your surface 📏 ruler if you want the lines to be really neat

The longest part of creating this activity was creating the grid! If you want this to look perfect you can use a ruler...

Monster Truck slide painting

My son loves making ramps out of all kinds of things to push his monster trucks down, so I thought I would turn it into a painting activity! What you need: 🚘 a ramp - we used a slide but you can use any kind of ramp you can find 🚘 tuff tray or something similar to catch the monster trucks at the bottom of the ramp 🚘 paper 🚘monster trucks 🚘sellotape 🚘paint How to do the activity

🚘 I used...