Fun and games

Fun and interesting activities

- Activities from Scouts, Cubs, Brownies, Rainbows and Guides

If your children are a member of Scouts, Cubs, Brownies, Rainbows or Guides, you may already know about these activities.

The Girl Guides – Offer an activity for the day and a weekly programme of activities.

The Scouts – They’ve created the "Great Indoors" initiative in partnership with the Young Studio to create more than 100 of the best activities for staying at home.

- Crafts

Although some of these are for adults, they may inspire some creativity.

Dyson foundation – Fabulous design and technology ideas of things to make for parents and for teachers. Download the challenge cards for free.

Fave Crafts – They have created a list of crafts to do when bored. 

Voice Mag – Read various blogs that have ideas about activities to do during lockdown.

- Creativity

Parents can encourage creativity by...

1. Asking questions: Creativity is all about questioning: How can I? Why should it? What would happen if? How can I make this, or how can I change this? It’s about making sure that children are always being asked those questions.

2. Keeping everything: Do not chuck anything away. Keep a bag with all the egg boxes and toilet rolls in a corner, because that’s going to be a mine of incredible craft-making materials. 

3. Setting challenges: What kind of musical instruments can you make today from what’s in the bags over there? STOMP have a great collection of ideas on YouTube to try out.

4. Giving them time: The beauty is that the parents are in control of the time, for once. So you can give your child two hours to get on with a wonderful creative task, and they wouldn’t have that in school.

5. Finding online resources: Use sharing resources like Twinkl, BBC Bitesize. And then there are the entrepreneurs, like Joe Wicks doing kids’ exercise classes. There are also artists and designers sharing resources. 

6. Being creative with space: Think about the space in your house. What can you change, what room could be theirs? What space is not utilized? What can you get rid of to make them a work area or for their equipment? That’s a very easy thing to fix.

7. Thinking outside the paintbox: Creativity is not just about arts and crafts, it’s also about the kitchen. What kind of lunch can they make for you while you’re working?

- Miscellaneous

Good to know – Things to do with kids: 58 cheap activities to keep children entertained.

Harry Potter Wizarding World – Hogwarts is brought to you with contributions from Bloomsbury and Scholastic publishers, nifty craft videos, fun activities and articles, quizzes, puzzles and plenty for first time readers, as well as those familiar with wizarding.

- Print and play board and card games

Coiled Spring:

• Kingdomino is a fantastic twist on the classic dominos, and is particularly helpful at reinforcing times tables, taxing with working memory, and testing special awareness. Your dominos have different types of territory (sea, forest, field, etc). You attempt to fill a 5x5 grid with large areas of the same type of territory to get the most points. Print pages 3 and 4, cut out the dominos, check the rules, and play.

Asmodee:

• Concept. This version doesn’t even need to be printed – similar to Pictionary or charades, gather round a screen and see who can work out the visual clues first (a kids version is also available). Vocabulary, reactions and logical thought are all put to the test here.
• Carcassonne is a very easy-to-learn tile-laying game, with the added advantage of only needing to print off pages 2 and 3. Research by the University of South Carolina, published last year, showed how Carcassonne helps with skills valuable for geographers, including special thinking, recognising and mapping features, the impact of infrastructure, and understanding the function and consequences of physical boundaries.

Isle of Cats:

• This is one of the biggest new games of 2020, and the creator has developed a remote version. This is one for ages 12+. The basic concept is simple. You have a boat, an island full of cats is in danger, you need to fit as many cats as you can on your boat. Filling up rooms scores you points, as does keeping families of cats together, and chasing off those pesky rats. Print on one black and white sheet of paper per person, and you’re ready to go – just follow along on the video in the link. Great for all kinds of functional maths skills around patterns and relationships.

- The name game

One for parents with a garden or nearby park for exercise, the name game exercises both body and mind if done right.

Children should split into players one, two or more and each player should think of an animal and play the others a fact about it.

The other players must try and guess the animal, with a maximum of three facts per person to guess.

Players should continue until the group has cycled through five animals each, taking inspiration from the outdoors where possible.

More details on the name game can be found in an article by the Express newspaper – the article also suggests some more activities.