Creative ways to keep kids busy at home

Many of us will be trying to think of new ways to stay busy at home.

By Danielle Galvin

Parents the world over are getting creative in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.

Invariably, many of us will be spending more time at home over the coming weeks and forgoing the activities, play dates, and things we do each week to engage our children.

If you haven’t already, read through some of our tips here and common queries answered.

Many of us are either voluntarily keeping our kids home from school or daycare.

And if we’re not, we’re starting to think about things we can do to keep the kids entertained, as we all come to grips with it.

Here’s a few tidbits I’ve come across over the last day or so, which could be useful for fellow parents:

1. Josh Gad’s story times – The fabulously eccentric voice of Olaf from the Frozen franchise is reading to kids from Twitter. He puts on wonderful voices to entertain the kids. Super cute!

2. Storyberries –  This is an Australian story website, established five years ago by writer Jade Maitre with the aim of providing fresh, free kids stories online. Along with many hundreds of free, delightfully illustrated original picture books, poems, comics and fairy tales, each story is also accompanied by discussion questions designed to get parents and kids talking about life through literature. More here – https://www.storyberries.com/

3. Tour the San Diego zoo – Are you kids into animals? The San Diego zoo has this fabulous website – just for kids! I’s very user friendly and educational. Perfect for preschoolers. It also shows live web cams of animals! Info here: https://kids.sandiegozoo.org/

4. NASA’s arts and craft activities – Have you got a space obsessed little one? NASA has some great ideas here for younger kids – worth checking out! I only recently discovered this and it has some great activities, simple and scientific. More here – https://www.nasa.gov/stem-at-home-for-students-k-4.html