i find to cheap discount shop and getting the kids paint by number or canvas that they sale and some cheap paints that they can have doing they own craft and i put down old bed sheet and they love it i do with my son

Play dough, water play, kinetic sand Play, painting, colouring in, connectors (duplo), cooking experiences, little people Play, basic arts and crafts (pasting)

Sticker crafts, playdough are a good one, even just blank pages where they can use stamps scribble and put stickers on

Play dough, colouring in, stickers, painting (including finger painting)
Get some big sheets of paper and get them to draw on it, then use the paper for gift wrapping

Finger painting, or draw something on a piece of paper with a clear candle stick and get them to paint over the paper with water paint and your picture will show up. My son loves that but also playdoh.

Finger painting, sticker books, playdough.

home made playdough, sticking and gluing, sand or rice. Currently my 2.5 year old has a pair of scissors and paper and he just likes to cut them into tiny tiny pieces.

My 2yo loves play dough! Using shapes to cut and rolling pins to flatten etc Also just drawing with big crayons or fingerpainting is always fun too.

Child friendly scissorts and paper. If you buy some clear contact book covering and place it on a table with the sticky side face up they can cut and stick on it to make their own pictures. Painting, outside chalk, stickers, ball of wool and some popsticks, shaker bottles, cardboard tubes for sticking things on, make a mailbox out of cereal box and they can cut, scrunch and fold their own letters to post, decorate paper planes, popstick puppets. I encouraged the messy crafty stuff in our house and still do!

I find that children like to do stuff that interests them – if you have some dinosaurs (who doesnt) get some white paper and some paint and let the dinosaurs stomp all over the paper, this is an easy and great activity and you can also use other animals for a change.
Involve your child in the making of playdough, they love being able to stir it and add the ingredients, then playing with something they made themselves.
You can use some longer pipecleaners for threading, using large beads, pasta or anything that has a hole in the ends. Making necklaces, bracelets or hanging decorations. You can also dye the pasta if you want .. let it dry and then thread it.
If you have some of the small tongs you can use them to pick up items and put them into different containers, it helps with the children’s find motor skills/hand-eye co-ordination and its a lot of fun at the same time.
Use some pegs for free play, they can attach them to things or peg up items onto curtains or lines you can put up.
The list is never ending once you start to do things plus some of the new things come from the children as they take the task in a different direction.

Colouring in. scrunched up colour paper with glue on a blank piece for him to stick on.

I always giving mine similar one…even if I know she will draw or stick whatever and whether she wants.

My two year old loves painting. She also loves to stick stickers on things so those activity books with stickers is another idea as is colouring pop out Christmas decorations.

I am also interested in these answers for my 2 year old. I love the answer below with kids scissors & paper.

Child scissors and coloured paper and just let them go to town if the other kids are doing cutting and gluing.
Water painting. You can buy books that you can do this with (Big W sell them) you reuse them over and over or just let them paint cement etc with the water if the other kids are painting.
Play-Doh of the other kids are doing clay etc.
If the kids are doing beading or similar you can buy really big beads and string for the little one.