In these unprecedented times, you’re likely to be spending a lot more time indoors with your kids. So we’ve put together some ideas of fun activities to keep them, and yourself entertained. These activites mostly involve items you’re likely to have in your household already, or can be easily sourced.
Flower Pressing
Spring has just begun and there are so many beautiful blossoming flowers sprouting up everywhere.
If you’re lucky enough to have a garden, this is the perfect place to explore with your kids, looking for flowers with vibrant colours and shapes or interesting textures. As you pick them, you can soak up the sunny rays and even use the time as a mini-lesson in science and botany, explaining about how bees pollinate or how to care for plants. Once you’ve gathered your loot, place the flowers inside heavy books and leave for a few days. Then, when they’ve dried you can use them for art, sticking them on paper to make cards to send to loved ones, making DIY butterfly wings or to display in frames.
Baking
Who doesn’t love freshly baked goodies?
Learning to bake is a great way to get a child interested in cooking and is a valuable life skill. There are so many options from healthy or gluten-free to indulgent, all readily available on the internet. Why not teach your children a favourite recipe that you used to make when you were a child? As the smell comes wafting through the house you’ll be transported back to simpler times. Here’s a favourite from our Head of Marketing when she was a child – tried and tested!
ZOE’S BROWNIES
Ingredients:
200gms butter
½ cup of cocoa powder
dash of salt
2 cups of brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
1 cup of self-raising flour
½ cup of walnuts (optional)
Method:
Preheat the oven to 180C and grease a tin 30 x 18 cm, setting aside till later.
Put butter and cocoa in a big pot and melt gently.
Add salt, sugar, and vanilla – stir well and take off the heat.
Sift in flour – stir well.
Add eggs – beat in well.
Add chopped walnuts if you wish, and spread mixture evenly into the tin.
Bake for 20- 25 minutes. Don’t overcook, the brownie is ready when the top is slightly springy but still gooey on the inside.
Simple and utterly delicious!
Listen to an Audiobook Together
Audiobooks are a great entertainment option that doesn’t involve staring at a screen all day.
There are thousands of books to choose from, many you can find for free online. This means that you can turn it up loud and continue to potter about the house, getting on with your business and having a story read to you and the kids at the same time. You can listen to classics like Roald Dahl, get stuck into the Harry Potter series or find something new to explore that’s a recent arrival.
Bead Making
Crafty afternoons are always fun, and making your beads for DIY jewellery is an inexpensive way to spend one with kids, with the added bonus of upcycling.
This activity could get a little messy and you may need to help little ones out a bit, but it’s something fun they can wear as well as make!
What you’ll need:
Some old magazines, cards and colourful paper
PVA glue
Something long and thin to wrap the paper around – like a skewer
Scissors
Ruler & pen
String
Clear nail varnish (optional but will make your beads stronger)
Method:
Start by measuring really long triangles out of your old magazines/cards that have pretty colours. From an A4 size use your ruler to go from one side to the other so that it’s in a zig-zag. The base of your triangle will be the length of your bead. Cut as many beads out as you want carefully, but feel free to experiment with different sizes and colours.
Take the skewer and starting at the wide base, roll the paper around the skewer so it forms a cylinder. Apply some glue just below the bottom of the skewer and begin to carefully roll, making sure that each spiral is symmetrical as the bead forms. Stop every so often to add more glue and you can realign at these points if needed.
When you have about 3cm remaining on the paper, put glue on the underside, continue to roll and stick down to finish.
Pop your finished beads on a spare skewer to dry, once this is done you can add a coat of clear nail varnish if you want to make them more durable.
Once completely dry thread them onto a string to create a necklace or bracelet, and voila! Get your little one to do a fashion show for you with the jewellery she’s created.
We hope you’ll find this list inspiring and let us know if you try any ideas out via our Instagram- we’d love to see any creations you make! Check back next week for more ideas in our ‘stuck at home blog’ series!
