Everyone was permitted home due to the COVID-19 lockdown. Kids are feeling bored at home while the parents are busy with their home and office work. Lockdown is challenging for most of the parents as they need to homeschool their kids while working from home. From the positive side, it is a great time for the parents to strengthen their bond with the kids and read their minds.
The common question that is striking off the parents is how to keep the kids busy during the lockdown? Welcome your kids into the world of fun with the more creative ideas to ignite their imagination while they are at home.
Here are a few things to do with kids in lockdown and create memories that last for their lifetime.
1. Make Them To Bake With You:
Educate kids cooking to indulge in some healthy eating habits. Learning to cook healthy snacks and meals will help them to maintain long term well-being. Cooking skills are especially important for the kids to meet the dietary guidelines.
Encourage them to bake the cookies, cakes, brownies, and anything healthy that you would like to cook for them. It is a great activity for the kids to know about the ingredients, motor skills, and some measuring skills. It is a great way to connect with your kids.
2. Get Your Kids To Do Exercise Or Yoga:
For most of the adults, exercise is all about working out in the gym. But for the kids it’s all about playing and keeping them active. Too much of screen time is shielding your kids away from physical activity. Use this period to keep them on a healthy track by raising them as healthy and fit.
Make your kids start their day with yoga or exercise. Make it a family activity. Early morning exercises keep everyone active throughout the day. By including the exercise in their daily life, you can help them to keep their weight gain in control. Exercises will also protect your kid from many diseases. By getting your kids into exercise or yoga, you can help them create a better outlook on their life.
3. Allow Them To Do Crafting!
Kids just love to spend time with parents and crafts and arts are the better way that can work out well. Crafting is all time favorite, funny, and creative activity for the kids. It doesn’t require any supplies from the outside. Just the back up of your kid’s stationary and recyclable things at home is enough to start this activity.
You have many recyclable things at your home including cardstocks, empty tissue rolls, milk cartons, egg cartons, plastic bottles, glass jars, juice tins, etc. encourage your kids to use these things and make out something different using their creative minds. It helps you to teach them the importance of recycling and protecting the environment. Crafting models your kid into a responsible being. Arts and crafts will foster child development from all sides.
4. Get Kids To Write Poems And Stories:
These days writing is an excluded activity from many schools. This is making the kids to lose the tone of benefits both physically and mentally. The lockdown has provided you an opportunity to work on their skills. Poetry is something that helps your kids to put their emotions and feelings on the paper. It especially works with the introverted kid. Poetry puts your child into the right mood.
Stories on the other side will make them explore the creativity that is hidden in them. Provide your kid a special book to put on their thoughts. Creative writing is a great exercise for their minds and fosters self-confidence, self-esteem, and communication. Writing is a powerful tool that helps kids to influence others through persuasion and improves their own cognitive development.
There are many ways to showcase their skills by posting their work or allowing them in some writing contests. This step can encourage and inspire them to continue improving their writing skills.
5. Make Kids Do Daily Chores:
kids benefit the kids in many ways. Helping out around the house make them feel capable and part of a team. Daily chores model the kids into responsible.
List out some age specific chores for your kids and paste them on the refrigerator or any other easily accessible place. Chores will help the kids to gain some important life skills that will help them to serve their rest of their life in a smart way. It is a best option to teach kids discipline and obedience.
For pre school kids, put the chart with the pictures of the respective chore as they can not read. Reward system is required for the older kids to stay motivated.
6. Make Out Some Time For Learning:
Though it can’t keep your kids entertained, it will help them to get to understand how the learning from home is more easy, flexible, and comfortable. Set up a designated area for them to start their learning. Having a specific place can help kids to focus more. Avoid your kids to read on their beds as they can retard their concentration. Allow them to take short breaks between to relax their minds.
Equip the kids with some smart skills to finish their work in time before they go back to school. Take an active part in assisting your kids to get easily through their learning process. Allow the kids to do the homework at the same time every day.
7. Learn New Language:
Knowing a secondary or tertiary language will be beneficial for your kids in many ways. It can enhance their scope of learning. With the world turning digital everything is at the finger tips and learning has become so easy.
There are more games available that can teach your kids new language in the form of the games and pictures that make learning fun and easy.
8. Get Your Child In Some Gardening Activities:
Grow some vegetables and fruits in your backyard. Give your child some space to grow the plants on their own. Kids love to dig in the dirt and plant some seeds.
Give your kids to explore and understand the needs of the plants. It makes them to experience and learn some valuable lessons. Gardening helps the kids to strengthen the body management skills, and object control skills which they need while moving the tools, water, and soil from one place to another place.
9. Arrange Role Play For Kids:
Role play activities are the best way to encourage the imagination and the creativity of your kids while they are in the home. They can foster the social and emotional development of your child.
Allow your kids to experiment with things through role play. Children can get a chance to learn various cultures and the terminologies associated with the various fields. Role play activities reflect the dreams of your kids. Encourage your child to gather the essentials required for their role play. Aloe your child to get into various occupational, fantasy, and real life situation role plays. Reinvention allows kids to build up happy and healthy environment for their growth.
10. Learn Dance And Music:
Music and dance are the fun activities and the children love to move around making the noises. Put this into the right way by introducing singing and dancing. These can teach the kids how to interact with the other people and the objects around them.
Dancing can help the kids to know how they can move their bodies. Dancing allows the kids to effectively use different kinds of muscles. Dancing can be experimented with the travelling motions such as walking, sliding, and jumping. Children learn to gain control and coordination over their movements through dancing. It can help them to build the spatial awareness.
Singing on the other hand will help them to learn the language and sounds. Vocabulary and communication can be increased in a great way through singing. Rhyming in the songs is a great exercise for the brain and helps them to foster their memory skills. When the kids learn to create music they stay more focused.
Dance, music, and singing create the healthy outlets for the emotions of the child as they can not express their emotions through words all the time.
11. Make The Kids Prepare E-Newspapers:
This is one of the innovative ways to keep kids busy during lockdown. Allow the kids to prepare their own e-newspapers and mail it to the parents. Ask them to gather the most trending and the viral news from each category and write it down to make their own newspaper. This activity can help the kids to go through and understand the content in detail.
Once they have the paper full of exciting stories, ask them to share with you.
12. Keep Them Busy With The Puzzles:
Puzzles are the great way to keep your kids busy and occupied. Both parents and kids can spend time together in solving the puzzles.
They are fun and great education learning tool for the kids and the older children. You can make simple puzzles like word matching, word cluster, for the younger kids and you can collect some set of Sudoku puzzles for the older kids.
Keep in mind the abilities of your child while designing the puzzles. Puzzles provide kids a platform to analyze and strengthen their abilities.
13. Do Some Science Projects!
We can not get science kits in this pandemic situation as all the stores remain closed. But still you can encourage them do the science projects with the things that are available at home. This is one of the best activities to keep the kids busy during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Here are some DIY home projects for kids:
A. Demonstrate how bleach works!
● For this experiment, you need to take the two clear plastic cups fill the one with water and few drops of dye (preferably red as you can notice the changes well) to it and mix it up well until it turns red.
● Fill one quarter of the other cup with the bleach and add it slowly to the water mixture.
● Ask your kids to observe the phenomenon of the bleach that expands the dye molecules attached to the water thereby making it to look clear again.
B. The magnetic power:
It is an amazing activity to show the little ones the power of the magnets. Fill tray with the metal and the non metal things and give them a magnet and ask them to place it at certain height and ask them magnet attracting many things on its way.
This simple project will allow the kids to distinguish between metal and the non-metal things.
C. Lava lamp:
Make your kids to do the lava lamp with the things that are easily available at the home. It is very easy, cool, and so simple to make.
● Take a flask and fill most of its way with the vegetable oil and fill the rest of the part with water. You can observe water sinking to the bottom of the oil.
● Make the kids to add few drops of food coloring of their choice. As the food color is also water based it will sink to the bottom making the water to turn to its color.
● Break the alka seltzer tablet into few small pieces and add one at a time. You can observe the lava lamps starts erupt into activity! You can add more alka-seltzer when the reaction slows down.
The lava lamp works because of ten two principles density and polarity.
14. Get Your Child Into The Habit Of Reading!
The lockdown period is a great time to indulge in some great activities into the daily routine of your kids. Give them some fantasy or a comic book and give them age specific target and ask them to complete within a specific period.
Reading promotes the attention and concentration of the kids. This can foster their vocabulary and the language skills. Reading helps the kids to fill their mind with many interesting facts and boosts their zeal to learn the new things.
15. Enroll In Some Online Activity Classes:
Take some time to get to know the hobbies and interests of your child. As per their interests you can enroll them in different activity e-classes including general knowledge, art and craft, music etc. give them specific task easy task to put down what they have learned. Allow them to get into some interactive online activities.
Help your kids to pick up a hobby of their own in which they have the genuine interest.
16. Encourage Kids To Build The Den!
COVID-19 lockdown has made the to lose the outdoor experience. Are they feeling bored at home! Here is a simple idea to regain their joy. Assist your kids in building a den inside the home and seek their suggestion how they want their den to look like.
Table, cushion, and some sheets are enough to build the den. Allow your kids to use their own imagination to add interior to their den. Give them the choice of decorating their own den with various colors and lights.
Building den allows kids to enhance their creative and the problem solving skills. A den can be a great setting for the privacy and the role play. Kids love to play hours of time in their den with their favorite activities.
17. Plan Family Movie Marathon:
Movie marathon is the great way to keep your kids engaged while you are running for the work and the other responsibilities from home. Marathons can help to engage the kids, entertain them, and teach them some good things. Subscribe to the Netflix and scream your kid’s favorite movies that make them stick to the screens and ensure that they should have small gaps meanwhile to protect their eyes from the risk of getting strained.
Here are a few movies that keep your kids engaged and entertained:
1. The Harry potter series
2. Zootopia
3. Jumani
4. Inside Out
5. Home
6. Onwards
7. Frozen
8. Mary Poppins
9. Peter Pan
10. The Lion King
18. Play Dough:
Play dough keeps the kids busy for hours together. you can help the kids prepare their own play dough at home. Let us look into the process of making the play dough.
Ingredients:
● 1 cup Flour
● ¼ cup Salt
● 1 tablespoon Cooking oil’
● 3 tablespoons of Lemon juice
● Essential oils or Kool Aid for fragrance
● Food coloring
How To Make:
- Mix the water and lemon juice together and heat in the microwave until just boiling for about three minutes.
- Meanwhile you boil the water, mix flour and salt together.
- If you are using the Kool aid for fragrance, just add them to the hot water mixture and you can add additional coloring to intensify the appearance.
- Slowly pour the water mixture into the flour and stir it well with the wooden paddle till you notice the formation of the dough.
- At this point, you are required to use your hands to work with dough. The dough may feel a bit sticky at this stage but can settle down to the normal state once it has cooled down. You can add a tablespoon of the flour to give the consistency.
- While cooling the dough, you can use the sheet of aluminum foil, parchment, or wax paper.
Now the scented play-dough is ready for your kids to play with. Allow them to have the endless joy while trying to make different shape each day.
19. Help Kids To Make Their Donations Ready!
Allow the kids to go through their toys and toy bags that they do not want or lo longer in use and make them to pack in the cardboard boxes after the completion of the lockdown.
Kids with the charitable mind are able to cope well with their own problems when compared to others. Donations improve the self esteem, self confidence, and the self-worth of the kids in the long run.
20. Explore The World Through Digital Travelling:
Kids are very excited to go for trips! The lockdown may be upsetting for them as they the pandemic has permitted everyone to their homes. The advent of the digital era made nothing impossible.
There are many apps and websites available that describe about the countries and the people and provide the great tips for your next family trip! These apps are designed to fulfill the curiosity of the kids to explore the different countries from their couch.
21. Arrange Video Call With Their Friends:
Never make your kids feel that they are missing their friends. Arrange a facetime or skype video with their close friends where they can play hangman, truth or dare, and other funny games by being at the safe distance.
This activity helps kids to achieve the emotional and social development. Having quality time with the friends promotes their positive outlook on the life.
22. Plan For A Glamorous Spa At Home!
It is the fun and the pampering activity for the kids. Let your kids to join their hands in making the DIY face masks with fruits and the other available ingredients at home. It will teach the kids personal body care.
You can arrange different pampering stations including pedicure, manicure, face mask pamper, and hair saloon the same day or on various days of a week.
In conclusion, there are chances that kids may run into frustration when they experience the episodes of loneliness. There are many other activities to keep your kids busy and engaged, a few activities are discussed in this article that help to promote their right attitude, creativity, and self-confidence.
