Primary Times - the definitive what’s on and where to go family guide of activities and events for children of primary school age. Things to do with your kids during the school holidays including arts and craft activities, music and theatre for children, parties, competitions, days out, and family attractions along with term time drama schools, dance classes, after school clubs and sports activities. Things to do at a place near you!
Inexpensive Ways To Entertain Your Kids During A Locked Down Half-Term
Half-term is upon us and with every passing day there appears to be more restrictions and lockdown measures put into place. Entertaining children during half-term will be a challenge for a lot of parents, especially when many will still be working from home. Below are some tips and ideas to help you keep the children entertained this half term.
Arts and crafts
Probably the messiest pass-time possible, but kids love to engage with their creative ideas, and you’ll get some fantastic artwork for your home that your children will feel proud of creating. You can get paints and colouring pencils relatively cheap and they last a while so you can revisit these activities on a rainy afternoon. You can even breakout the pasta shells and get them to create a scene from their favourite TV show or ask them to do a pasta family portrait.
Take a trip to the woods
If there are, by some fluke, brighter days, get the kids wrapped up warm and take them out for a long walk in the woods. You could use the opportunity to add some new images to the family album and you can collect some sticks and other natural items for arts and crafts. Leaf pressings are always great fun, especially with all the autumnal colours, and collecting conkers can keep children entertained for hours!
Halloween activities
Although trick or treating may be difficult this year, this doesn’t mean Halloween should be completely cancelled. You should still carve pumpkins and watch some children’s Halloween specials - obviously avoiding anything too scary as you don’t want your children waking you up in the middle of the night after a nightmare! Another thing you can do is create some cheap costumes; this will ignite their creative juices and keep them occupied for hours. For example, you could collect old blank tights, stuff them with old newspaper and create spiders legs to attach to your child with string. You could also do some apple bobbing because who doesn’t love a bit of competition whilst also encouraging them to get their five a day.
Create dens and forts
Get all the pillows and sheets off the beds and create a den/fort wherein you could let their imagination run wild. The fort could be a secret hideout for pirates or even a castle for a king or queen; let their story telling do its magic and just play along with their conjured scenario. Once they start getting tired, you can even treat the den as a lovely place to watch some of their favourite movies together before then nod off for a nap.
Board games
When the rain is lashing down and the TV is showing the same programmes on repeat, you should consider cracking out the board games. They are a fantastic way of passing the time and games like monopoly can teach children about money. Again, there is nothing quite like a bit of healthy family competition and these boardgame moments will be cherished by your child for years to come.
Scavenger hunt
You can set this up quite easily around your house by giving your child or children a list of items that you have hidden and asking them to hunt each of them out in a set amount of time. Crucially, this will also help to tire them out and give you some much-needed rest.
The above tips will help to provide hours of fun for children of all ages and make sure they are tired for when bedtime rolls around. This half-term will be challenging for many parents and it’s important to remember to take time for yourself and not burn out.