Simple,cost effective children’s activities to do at home if you need to self isolate

March 14, 2020 Karen 25 comments
Posted by Karen on

When my children were young and when I was working as a registered child minder, I was always looking for simple, cheap activity ideas that the children could do. Now that the corona virus is forcing some people to self isolate having things to entertain children is even more important:-

One of the most popular activities became a Christmas tradition in my setting.

I gave each child an empty shoe box ( most shops will happily give these away). I then supplied last years Christmas cards, some themed stickers and glue, the children covered their box with the pictures, I then made a solution of 1 part P.V.A. glue to 2 parts water which when pasted over the pictures. helped keep them in place and gave them a varnish. After leaving to dry overnight the children then filled their treasure box with Christmas makes ready for taking home on Christmas eve.

Treasure boxes could be made to suit other themes; Easter, a birthday or a holiday memory keepsake.

Another idea is to give the children a piece of foam,( oddments of foam can be purchased from scrap stores for a few pounds) some golf tees or toothpicks and a small hammer.

. Children are encouraged to hammer the tees into the foam to make a design, or if you paint a number on the foam, hammer that amount of tees. Number recognition here.

Learn to match and recognise colours by using empty toilet roll tubes painted in different colours then provide items of different colours and ask the children to place them in the corresponding tube.

A favourite activity of a particular little boy was to ‘paint’ my garden fence on a sunny day. I supplied him with a bucket of water and one of my husband’s paintbrushes ( he was a painter and decorator) the boy then painted the fence; as the wood became wet it changed colour looking as if it had been painted.

Coloured chalks are great for drawing on paving slabs and as the rain will wash it away there is no cleaning up afterwards.

Give the children a piece of card each with a colour swatch on the top, then get them to look through old magazines for pictures of that colour, cut them out and stick onto the card to create a collage of the colour.Colour recognition here

Of course books, jigsaws and board games are also great for keeping children amused if you are forced to stay at home.

Arts and crafts on a shoestring .here.

As always questions and comments are welcome.

Until next time.

Karen

x

25 Comments on “Simple,cost effective children’s activities to do at home if you need to self isolate”

  3. I agree with last comment I loved the “paint the fence idea” really great ideas here which will be such help if we end up spending long hours indoors

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  4. This is some great ways to entertain the little ones at home and this link up party helps me so much and it gets my mind of all the news

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  10. These are brilliant. I am going to share them in my two groups for parents I run. Thank you. Hope you guys are doing ok? #stayclassymama

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  14. Some great ideas – I especially love the shoe box idea! We also use a water spray to spray our fence – can keep the little ones entertained for hours! #KCACOLS

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  17. I like the idea of doing coloured toilet roll tubes and putting pompoms in the corresponding colour. Painting with water is such a fun idea too. #KidsandKreativity

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