Most of us are currently working remotely. This drastic change in our daily lives is often hard on family. Stress levels raise because we are juggling our work schedule with our teaching schedule. For those of us who are not used to teaching our children (on a daily basis), we decided to put a list of activities together for you to use that has helped prevent us from pulling our hair out.
- Exercise: Most of your schedules have drastically changed. It is easy to not be mobile during the massive amounts of down time. There are plenty of available resources on Youtube to create fun filled workout sessions with your children. This will drain some of that endless energy children have as well as help with your overall stress levels.
- Play board games: seems like an obvious choice, right? Putting the technology down and sitting around the dinner table with the people you care about most. Something magical seems to happen. You laugh, you interact, and you escape reality if only for a moment. If you haven’t looked up new board games for a while, then you will be quite surprised at the different choices and new ideas that your kids will love. 3
- Create a schedule that is similar in school. Your children may be shocked by the overall free time currently available to them. It would be beneficial to attempt to get them used to the similar schedule they had while at school. Try to schedule learning, fun, and exercise evenly throughout the day so your children know what to expect. Children seem to be more receptive to daily activities when its repetitive each day of the week.
- Have a Skype or Facetime Party! It’s no secret that we are all missing the connection we get with in–person meetings and social interaction. The best way to combat this safely is to invite your friends and family to a group facetime or skype connection. You can even play games during this time as well! This will help your children who are getting lonely from not seeing their friends.
- Read: Encouraging your children to read during this time will drastically help them when they go back to school. Much like the summer months, children seem to lose attainment without practice. Books are a great way to keep the noise level down when you are attempting to work from home.
- Play Video Games: I remember a time where this was frowned upon, but there are a ton of online learning video games available for free out there. Your child could think they are playing a video game, that would be true, but they are also learning all different types of subjects at the same time.
- Hide and Go Seek: Hide and seek is a great game to play when you are at home with your kids for long periods of time. Depending on the age of your kids, you may have to pretend not to see the younger ones due to their lack of self-awareness.
- Online Trivia: Sit down in the afternoon with your kids and compete with other families on the Eventricate Facebook page! We have custom built trivia questions to entertain all different age ranges. Everything from pop culture to geography!
- Build LEGO: If you don’t have a LEGO bucket in the house, you should! LEGO is a great way for kids to learn engineering, boost creativity, and problem-solving skills. You can buy a bucket of 500 pieces on amazon for $25. If you are like us and grew up playing with LEGO, you will quickly realize how much fun you used to have except now you get to share it with your kids.
- Go For a Walk: If you are like us, you have been hunkering down with you family for almost 2 weeks by now. You may feel that you have a short temper or cannot concentrate at work. This is probably your body telling you to go outside! You can practice social distancing while walking around your neighborhood
- Indoor Dance Party: If you have access to a kid friendly playlist through your home voice device then that is an easy option. There are also games like “Just Dance” for gaming consoles that are extremely fun to play with your kids. You don’t necessarily need to buy the newest one if you are trying to save money, an older version will get the job done just as well.
- Assign Chores and Rewards System: Getting your kids to do chores have been difficult in the past, but you may find that your children are a little more receptive to it since they have so much time on their hands. Use a candy or sticker reward system on the fridge to teach your kids the value of hard work.
- Take an Origami Class: Lots of available tutorials online for kids. This can get frustrating for younger age groups, so use your best judgement. You may want to show your kids how to follow along with the videos so they can learn more shapes and creations while you work from home.
- Arts and Crafts: Painting, drawing, sculpting and any other medium you wish. You can repurpose old cardboard boxes or plastic items from the recycling bin and let your kid’s imaginations run wild. Create templates with cardboard cutouts to make it easier for them to copy. Empty paper towel and Toilet paper rolls glued together make great swords!
- Bake Cookies: Its messy, fun and edible! Your kids will enjoy mushing the dough, while you enjoy spending quality time with them. You don’t necessarily need to make chocolate chip, be sporadic and add their favorite candies to the mix!
- Play Cards: Uno, Rummy, Go Fish, any of these games are easy to learn and play with your children.
- Play Chess or Checkers: This could be considered inside the board games section, but we really wanted to emphasize these games because they teach your child about strategy and thinking ahead. Chess is a fantastic game to learn and eats up a lot of time when two opponents are at the same skill level.
- Learn Magic Tricks: Youtube has a ton of online resources for kids to learn simple card magic, coin magic, and magic tricks with household items. You can always learn them first and teach your kids first-hand or watch their eyes light up when you show them a trick you mastered.
- Puzzles: We haven’t found a better way to keep our kids sitting in one place for longer than 20 minutes. Place all the pieces on a table for your kids to work on throughout the week. You would be amazed at how much gets done each day.
- Learn to Meditate: This can be difficult for some age ranges to learn, but meditation can really help you and your loved ones manage stress levels. Breathing techniques mixed with sitting quietly has proven to lower blood pressure and soothe the soul. You may want to start with a minimal time limit and work your children up to longer meditation.
- Take Virtual Tours: Just because we are stuck in our houses doesn’t mean we can’t visit a farm or the aquarium with some VR goggles. You can use your cell phone for the 360 videos and a cheap VR headset from google or amazon.
- Do Science Experiments with Bill Nye: His online learning and home demos are a great way to keep the kids occupied. Who knows? You may learn something as well!
- Listen to a Podcast: No better way to teach your children new things than with online resources that are provided by Iheart Radio. You can see what kid friendly podcasts are available in the “Stuff you should know” section of podcasts.
- Scavenger Hunt: Create a scavenger hunt of different items around the house, print out a worksheet for your children to check off and time them! See who spots all the items you listed for a prize.
Remember that this is only a temporary situation. Everything will get better if we all continue to work together during this chaotic time. Leading by example is the best teaching method for your children. If you are calm and collected, your children will be as well. Try not to focus too much on clickbait articles and media biased that are spreading misinformation. Take breaks, enjoy this extra time with your children and you will create fond memories that they will hold close to their hearts for decades to come.
If you need to entertain yourself or your neighbors during this social distancing, you could always rent a projector or outdoor movie to change it up a bit! We constantly disinfect our products and are still delivering to neighborhoods who wish to have a get together of less than 10 people. Feel free to give us a call at 404 530 9000 or fill out a contact form for more information.