Keeping your Kids Occupied this Summer – 4 Interesting Home-based Activities

Summer break is a great time to bond with the kids and let your own inner child peek out occasionally. But too much leisure can produce mind-numbing boredom and turn your little angels into tantrum-throwing ogres. Here are four fun activities guaranteed to keep the kids out of trouble and definitely out of your hair this summer. Feel free to add them to your parenting arsenal.

wonder of nature by JON_CF

Go for a nature walk – To add spice to your nature walk, add a theme or goal and stick to it. For instance, you could go to the beach and collect stones and shells to make an art object out of it later. In the forest, invite them to collect at least five varieties of flowers, bugs, plants or leaves. Give them a plan and a purpose so they don’t get bored too quickly.

Play online kids’ games – A simple google search will bring up scores of quality educational websites that offer fun learning games designed to keep kids productively engaged through play. Online learning games cover a variety of subjects - including math, science and language arts – and are tailored to suit kids of different age groups - preschool, kindergarten and elementary grades - and are developed by subject matter experts who know that kids learn best when they’re having fun.

Baking and cooking – Have a designated baking or cooking day once a week and be sure to involve the kids in the process from beginning to end. Give them a variety of recipes and stock up on the ingredients ahead of time. If your little one can read, let him read from the recipe and practice using unfamiliar words. Help him work through the instructions, one step at a time and avoid the temptation of doing it all by yourself. This is a great activity for summer afternoons when it’s too hot to play outside.

Start a summer scrapbook – This is a great way to preserve memories that your family can fondly cherish when the kids are older. Encourage your little ones to take pictures of special days or events and write about them. Encourage them to maintain a daily diary and describe everyday things and happenings. This is a fun way to keep them occupied and create a memory book for the future.

If you have other interesting summer activities for kids up your sleeve, I’d love to hear them!

School's around the corner - did you do anything not on your 'to do' list?

Time flies and the best example for that is the pace at which the summer goes by. We look forward to it and plan a whole bunch of things to do. Stick it on the refrigerator. Think about it. Talk about it. Actually do things on the list. But, most holidays, something gets left out for the last few weeks or days.

So the countdown has begun. Have the kids played enough? Outside, inside, with friends, on their own and with their grandparents? Oh, there's never enough time to play. Did you do something that was not on the list?

Escape the Room by karlnorling

Well, we did something interesting which was not on our list. In fact, my mother organized it for all of us. We went and played an escape room game. We were a multi-generational group - grandparents, parents and grandkids. What a ball we had!

Each one of us participated. Solved sudoku, searched for keys, scrambled through lots of misleading things in the room, and searched for clues. Yeah, all of us. On our knees, over cupboards and under the tablecloth!

We raced against the clock, shouted out stuff, scrambled around, found false leads and tried solving things under pressure. We could not get out within the prescribed time, but we did enjoy the madness!

What unexpected thing did you do this summer?

Understanding the five senses

Our senses are what we use to see what is out there in the world around us, where it is, to know if it is changing etc. This is one of the most important part of being alive, this feeling of being alive to everything around us, to react and interact with thing around us.

“Five Senses” by Nicki Dugan Pogue, licensed under CC BY SA 2.0

Like everything else in nature, our kids use their senses without our intervention. By our introducing them to sensory activities, we enhance their engagement with their senses. We must enthuse our kids about the world around us. They must understand that they share this planet with creatures of all hues, shapes and kinds. Just by dominating the planet, it does not mean that we are independent of others. Kids must be encouraged to get their hands dirty, to look around, to smell things, to hear things and taste a variety of things.

Here is a roundup of activities that get our kids to use their senses to wonder at the world around us–

1. Help kids listen to bird calls. Some wake up real early and others are rulers of the evening. Can they distinguish sounds without seeing the bird? A simpler exercise is to get the kids blindfolded and then talk from a short distance away. Can they recognize who is talking?
2. Lay out a variety of food – cooked rice, beans, diced tomatoes, cereal etc. With their eyes blindfolded, can they touch and tell what’s on the plate?
3. Can a kid smell food and recognize what’s getting prepared? Try frying garlic/onion, baking a cake, skinning an orange and cutting fresh vegetables – distinguishing smells can be a fun activity. Try smelling and identifying odd smells too.
4. Mute some program and see if the kids can recognize what the person is saying. This might be better for a slightly older child as lip reading might not be very easy.
5. Try closing one eye to see how depth perception changes
6. Let vibrating phones on surfaces teach a child how we can actually feel a sound!
7. Try this experiment to see how different parts of the body differ in feeling things.

So, go on and try these activities!

Cool Virtual Pet Games

If your child has been spending a lot of time in the virtual world and hankering for a pet at home, then in most probability it’s a virtual pet she’s adopted online! Virtual pet games have taken the world by storm and boast of a wide age range of players – 6 to 60! Here are a few of the most popular virtual pet games that you should be playing.

Magsafe by Travis Isaacs

Neopets

A sensation in the online world was born in 1999 – it was called Neopets. With millions of members clambering for the latest and the most exclusive pets, Neopets soon became a way of life. Besides offering virtual pets, the world of Neopets offered users a number of mini flash games too that made sure ‘once a Neopian, always a Neopian’. As Neopets continues to enjoy the same amount of popularity if not twofold, game developers have taken a cue and released a plethora of similar virtual pet games that are almost as much fun! Look out for lores in Neopets which make quite a cheerful read on a dull day and otherwise too!

Dragon Cave

Dragon Cave is an online game that allows users to adopt virtual pets – collect eggs, raise them to adulthood, and then breed them to cre­ate interesting lineages. Founded back in 2006, the game runs on the concept of stealing dragon eggs from a nest and keeping them as one’s own and later hatching them for a baby dragon. Players will have to click a certain number of times on the eggs to hatch them else they’ll expire leaving behind quite morbid message about how they died from lack of care! More the number of clicks, the sooner will the eggs hatch and dragons grow up. The interactive and very supportive community of Dragon Cave makes it easy for newbies to understand the game promptly and play it with expertise.

Flight Rising

Flight Rising is another online dragon game that is based on lore, just like Neopets. Every player has to choose a Flight at the beginning of the registration process. Picking a particular Flight determines the sort of Lair the player will eventually have and the eye color of the dragon. Once players get a dragon, the site automatically assigns another dragon to the player of the opposite gender to be its mate. Other than breeding dragons, there are a number of things to do with them – feed them, dress them up, gather items which can be sold, play mini games, fight in the coliseum, look for tiny pets for your dragons, or just interact with the community.

From the plethora of virtual pet games that are available online, it looks like they are here to stay for quite some time more. Either get your kids to adopt a virtual pet or you sneak into the virtual world to breed a pet – after all, it’s worth feeling like a kid again! 

Rainy Day Activities for Preschool Kids

I know how difficult it is to keep kids indoors when the skies open up and pour their hearts out! The kids are more than ever eager to step out and get soaked in the monsoon showers only to go down with a flu attack soon after. After much research and brainstorming, I've arrived at a few awesome preschool games and activity ideas that will make the little bundles of energy willfully stay indoors. Here are some of them.

Rainbow by Steve Snodgrass

Messy Fun

How the kids love getting messy and playing with colors, paints, squishy foods, chalk dust – just about anything under the sun that serves their objective of messy play! So what if they can’t step out in the rains – bring the fun indoor right in the bathtub! Hand them anything and everything that can get messy like shaving cream, bathtub paints, and bath crayons, pudding cups, acrylic tubes, etc. and let the fun begin. Allow the preschool toddlers to paint with their fingers, toes, heads, fists, anything for more fun.

Sticker Album

Get a few old magazines, pamphlets, and newspapers and sit your child down with them. Let kids find pictures of animals, food, babies, or cars from the piles of paper. Give them safety scissors and help them cut out the pictures. Stick the pictures on the large construction paper and your rainy day sticker album is ready for display!

Indoor Tents

A great way to promote role play among preschool children is to set them up a tent and invite a few of their friends. Since the weather outside is not too conducive for children to go out and play, it’s time you set them up an indoor tent.  Spread a bed sheet over a dining table and your indoor tent is ready to be camped in! Serve your little guests a few monsoon snacks like fritters, nachos, pancakes and the kids will be set to have a gala time camping!

Marshmallow Sticky Figures

Hand over a few thin pretzel sticks and a bag full of marshmallows to your preschooler. Have her build 3D houses, tepees, stick figures, etc. with the tools in hand. You’ll be surprised at some of the creations! Later lay out the creations on a plate at dinner as desserts.    

Storytelling

Don’t limit storytelling during monsoons to just bedtime. Sneak in under warm comforters whenever the sky wishes to turn into a gloomy shade of grey and read out from your child’s favorite books with cups of microwave-made steaming hot chocolate waiting for you both on the bed side table. Isn’t that a wonderful way of spending monsoon indoors?

However, don’t restrict yourself to just these ideas. Explore!

10 activities to celebrate Independence Day with your kids

Independence Day by Micky**

Plan ahead for the Independence Day weekend. Too busy to think up activities? Not enough time to plan some fun time with the kids? Worried the kids might end up playing regular online games on a special day? Hakuna Matata, which, if you have forgotten, roughly means 
'Don't worry, Be happy'!

So here are 10 great activities for celebrating Independence Day, with your kids:

1. Begin your day with star spangled slime (how cool is that!).

2. Make a T-shirt and wear them around with pride.

3. Decorate your home with an Independence Day Wreath.

4. Eco-friendly stars on your lawn.

5. Simple and fun games for the kids.

6. Spread the holiday happiness - spread some confetti!

7. Watching a parade? Get the kids to make their own independence day visors.

8. Make a Geodesic dome by changing the yellow straw to red!

9. Make some patriotic dessert (what's that?)!

10. Know more about the celebration, play a trivia game.

You have any other great ideas, let me know. 

A Memorable Summer

As kids grow many of their earliest memories fade, as childhood amnesia kicks in. Once they reach the years from when memories can be retained, it’s important to give them special memories, so that they can remember things via incidents, as in ‘…that summer when we went to Niagara Falls..’ or ‘…that winter when we built a snowman and have him wear grandpa’s red jacket…’ and so on. 

Here are 4 activities which are guaranteed to help build great memories:

tents by Marina Kuperman Villataro

Go camping
Kids love this one, inside or outside. Yes, I said 'inside'. Sometimes, as parents, we don't have the time or resources to take the kids camping. Well, we can always simulate it. Pitch a tent inside the house or in your backyard. have some interesting 'camp' food, sing songs, sleep early and make great memories!

Go on a trip 
Short, long, with extended family or just the immediate family, children love trips, the games played and the sights seen. Make sure there are lots of activities for younger kids. My kids remember a fireman’s pole they first saw on a holiday. It was ‘that’ holiday, when they saw it. Don't be hesitant. Soak in local stuff, go to farmer's markets, local parks, eat local, go fruit picking and do something totally silly. 

Visit relatives
Seriously - visit relatives. It can be pleasant, if everyone makes the effort to be well behaved. Kids need to know they belong. To grandparents, immediate family, cousins and close family friends. There are people they will fall back on in case of an emergency. More than anything else, large warm families meetings help build good behavior in kids. Kids insulated from families, need to learn about where they come from. 

This summer go do something off beat, which will build some great memories.