Keeping children entertained during holiday time can be challenging, but we’ve put together some ideas to ensure your child has fired-up fun.
It is good to let your child have some downtime during the holidays to refuel their energy levels. But, they’ll soon need some ]fired-up fun to add something different to their day.
14 ways for children to have fired-up fun
1. Plan a day trip once a week, for example, to a petting farm or to a park for a picnic. Your child’s mind will be abuzz with the stimuli that a new experience or environment offers.
2. Join a library. Consider that from this time forward they need never be bored again. A story reveals a new world to your child and a library makes these worlds accessible.
3. Cook and bake together, and give them a say in what they would like to make. This will call for planning and prepping skills, measurement and accuracy, conceptual skills and seeing a task through.
4. Get the plans out and build a model airplane together – a great visual motor activity; for younger children you could build LEGO or puzzles.
5. Plan and plant a food garden together. Part of the process will be deciding on the kind of vegetables or herbs that would thrive best in the allotted space and season. After that, it’s the fun part of prepping the soil and planting the seeds. This project will require a vested interest, research and application skills.
Read more about gardening with children.
6. Budget the pocket money. Get them thinking about what they have to spend, how they’ll make it last and how they can make more. Children will develop numeracy concepts in a concrete way.
7. Keep a holiday diary or start a blog. This will develop recall and writing skills and exercise their ability to summarise along with developing language and technical skills. Best of all, they can look back at it later in the year and remember all their fired-up fun activities.
8. Spend time out in the garden. Instruct your child to look closely at something growing, for instance a pretty flower or tree, and try to memorise it. After that, encourage them to draw it. This encourages visual motor integration and memory.
9. Sign up with a holiday club. These provide great fun and social opportunities because many are built around special interests and are structured. They are almost always rigorously balanced to be fun and challenging.
10. Make a comic book. This employs many artistic skills, including drawing, colouring and creative writing, deciding on the storyline and sticking to it through words and pictures.
11. Read together every evening before bed. Start with stories suited to the reading level, thereafter slowing extend the material to something a little more challenging (for example, move from Roald Dahl to newspaper articles). This will activate their imagination, get them enquiring and encourage them to start finding meaning in text. Reading is an integral part of development and boasts a host of benefits.
12. Make a tented camp in the garden from old sheets. This engages them in fantasy play, and builds perceptual and planning skills.
13. Play board or card games – make your child the banker for the next game of Monopoly.
14. Diarise family daytrips, playdates, birthdays, the final countdown to Christmas (if you celebrate) and the first day of school on a large calendar. This will become a conversation piece and encourage children to plan ahead (“I only have 10 days to decide what to buy for Dad’s birthday”) and reflect (“What do I want for Christmas?”).
Lucille Kemp
