How to engage children during this extended break?
It is a difficult and confusing time for all of us. Children need you more than ever before. So what can you do that is both educational and fun, to keep your child engaged and happy? Let us look at the range of fun activities and ideas that can be a fun-filled engagement for your munchkin!
1. WORD OF THE DAY.
Encourage your child to maintain a diary wherein they would write one new word everyday along with their meaning. You could give them or they can come up with a new word themselves, maybe from their text books or novels/magazines they read or material they read online. After writing it down, they have to learn the new word and it’s meaning.This is the link where you can find age appropriate words for your child.
https://www.greatschools.org/gk/articles/academic-vocabulary-words-for-seventh-graders/
Make it fun for then and try to help them understand the meaning by giving them examples of the word usage. Remind your child that after every four days you will take test to see if they can recall the meaning as well as the spelling.
2. SORT IT OUT!
There are a lot of sorting activities that you can do with your children. For instance, you can give the child a mixture of pulses and ask them to sort out all the pulses of the same color in bowls.
3. Family Board Game Tournaments
Kids learn the best when they are happy. All the family members must get together and play board games like Ludo, The Game of Life, Monopoly. In addition to building a close family bond, these games help in sharpening thinking skills, creativity, and problem solving skills of children.
In fact, to further boost their out of the box thinking, children can make their own board game!
4. YOGA AND MEDITATION CAN BE FUN!
You can set up one hour session daily with your child wherein you can teach the child some breathing exercises, meditation and yoga asanas. For example, Mondays and Wednesdays could be Yoga Day while Tuesdays and Thursdays could be for breathing exercises and weekend could be for meditation. Try to make those sessions fun and interesting, for instance you could create interesting names for various asanas or you could take a picture of every member doing that asana and create fun memories.
Progressive muscle relaxation is an extremely powerful technique to relax mind and body. You can use it to teach your kids how to calm down themselves and be in control of their behavior. Use can use the following link to practice this amazing skill.
https://www.verywellmind.com/how-do-i-practice-progressive-muscle-relaxation-3024400
5. TELL A STORY
Sharpen the creativity and communication skills of your child by encouraging them to create their own stories. For instance, you can give them 4 words like red, cold, boy and garden, and the child has to create a story using these as components of the story. Like the story could be, “On one cold morning, I saw a boy holding a red balloon in the garden…I was watching him from my balcony.. And then suddenly.. “ You can help them when they get stuck . The idea is to encourage them to use their imagination to build stories.
6. CAN YOU SELL IT ?
Marketing skills is a crucial aspect of success. One must know how to highlight themselves and their work in this world. We need to start small with kids. So, ask your child to pick up household products of his choice and then sell it to you! For instance, they can try selling a liquid detergent saying that unlike powder, the liquid detergent doesn’t stick to the clothes and leaves a soft fragrance behind.
You can diversity and try different products!
7. Create your own Play-Doh clay at home
Play-Doh can engage children for hours and is good for their thinking skills as well as gross motor skills. The best part is that you can make it at home! All you need is two cups of plain flour, ½ cup of cold water, 1 cup of salt and 2 drops liquid food coloring. And let the fun begin!
8. LEARN AND PLAY!
You can help your child create quizzes and games that helps build his conceptual understanding. For instance, you can create a game wherein all the red spaces mean the player has to answer Science questions, orange for a fun activity like singing a song or telling a joke, yellow for word meanings and so on.
9. Treasure Hunt
Another fun way of learning is to hide individual letters in different corners of the house and ask your child to find those letters and after finding all the letters, they have to arrange them so that it makes a meaningful word.
For instance, you can separately hide letters R, O, C, U, G, E and A. After finding the letters, they will arrange it in a word i.e. Courage.
10. HOUSEHOLD CHORES
Children from the early age, must be engaged in household chores as it helps them in developing a sense of responsibility and becoming self-sufficient adults. You can set up one or two slots of 30 minutes each, depending on the age and maturity level of the child, wherein they will be in charge of a particular domestic task. They can pick up the chores they like to do and gradually you can encourage them to try their hands on a variety of tasks. Again, the idea is to make it interesting for them so that they can develop some liking for it. For instance, you can challenge them – how many clothes they can fold in two minutes and maintain a track of new records set by the child!
Hope you make the most of these activities. Have fun trying these out!
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