I started doing this activity with my 13 month old this week. You will need:
-1 ice cube tray
-some wrapped candies (we used soft mints)
-bonus: bring a couple other types of containers to play
For this age, I tend to not have any real objective in mind. I just emptied the mints out onto the ground and let her play. For us we also had a large tub that the mints were stored in that we brought out to play also. Pumpkin took right away to throwing the mints in the big tub and at the ice cube tray. Then she would take the container and shake it all up so that the mints would fly out.
After the fun of randomly throwing the mints wore out, I started putting the mints in the tray myself and Punpkin joined in on that fun! Sometimes she would see that her sister or I had the ice cube tray almost all the way full and decide it was a good time to start over by shaking the mints out of the tray. Then my step daughter would try and hurry up and fill the tray again and it became a race. We all had a good time. It's always interesting to see where these kinds of activities go.
If you have an older toddler that is into sorting a fun variation could be to paint (if you aren't going to be using these trays for food purposes) the cubes different colors and use m&ms to make a color sorting activity.
