Category: Personalized Gifts

Apps for Creative Kids

Posted on | by KD Novelties
Apps for Creative Kids
Get kids learning while on their devices.

Apps for creative kids can keep kids busy while learning. Many parents surrender their phone or tablet over to their child for scheduled play or when they are being particularly antsy, but technology can be good for more than just helping kids stay quiet! There are plenty of apps and games with educational and imaginative elements that can help your child think more creatively and have fun while doing it, too.

Drawing Challenge Game

This guessing game tests your child’s drawing skills yet also provides them with prompts to keep practicing that will leave them wanting more. This game asks kids 5 and up to draw something, then the AI technology the app uses will try to guess what it is. Will the app be able to guess whether your child drew a dog? A house? A lollipop? Try the app to find out!

Khan Academy Kids

Khan Academy has plenty of educational resources for learners of all ages. Their curriculum is specifically geared toward children ages 4-7 and covers everything from phonics and math to story-telling and problem-solving, and so much more. Complete with colorful characters, engaging activities and many avenues for self-expression, kids can have fun and learn a lot at the same time when using this app.


Stop, Breathe and Think Kids

Mindfulness apps are extremely popular with adults looking to destress and get more in tune with their own wellbeing. This app helps kids develop valuable mindfulness skills from a young age, which can help set them up for success and give them the ability to cope with life’s challenges much more easily as they age. Using games and activities, kids ages 5-10 learn breathing techniques and how to check in with their emotions, earning stickers for completing key mindfulness activities along the way.

Moji Moji

With Moji Moji, kids ages 4-6 can develop their literacy skills through activities like tracing letters and spelling games. Combining education and artistry, kids can learn their letters and develop key reading skills while also improving their handwriting and creativity at the same time.

The Cat in the Hat Builds That

This STEM-centric app brings Dr. Seuss to life while helping kids become creative innovators and engineers. With inventive Seuss inspired in-app activities like Bridge-a-rama, Sorta-ma-goo, and Slidea-ma-zoo, kids will develop organizational skill, experiment with measurements and numbers, and even learn a little physics!

If you know of any other apps for creative kids that can be helpful, please feel free and let us know in the comments.

Fun Indoor Games and Activities for Kids

Posted on | by KD Novelties
Quarantine Stay at Home Games and Activities

FUN INDOOR GAMES AND ACTIVITIES FOR KIDS

Staying indoors during playtime shouldn’t always default to screen time, whether it be watching TV or playing a game on a mobile device. While these are still viable options for when going outside is not in the cards, there are plenty of indoor games and activities, and other fun adventures kids can take part in while spending time inside.

While board games and crafts are other great go-to activities, here are some fun ideas where kids can get creative and interact with everyday objects around the house in a whole new way. Staying inside won’t ever be boring again!

Balance Beam

Want to keep your kids entertained for hours? You don’t need a tightrope for this game – just some tape and empty floor space. Gather some colored tape, whether it be crafting tape or scotch tape you’ve colored with a marker, and place strips in straight lines on the floor. Now for the challenge! Can your kids walk a tightrope over these lines without tipping over? Create challenges by adding obstacles (like pillows or soft furniture) or create lines of varying lengths and see how well your kids can balance while they walk in as straight of a line as they can! Tally scores and use a timer to add some more incentive to keep playing. Can your kids beat their previous scores? What’s the record time they can achieve?

Build a Fort

If you know you’re going to be indoors for a while, constructing a fort to last you the duration of your time will be well worth the effort. With your kids, gather materials from around the house, whether they be pillows, blankets, or a combination of both. You can use furniture to help prop up your forts, add comfy padding inside, and station everything either near a TV or in a play area so you can bring other activities inside the fort once it is complete.

Reading and Book-Related Activities

Reading is a go-to indoor activity for kids and adults alike. Whether you read before bedtime or bring a few books into your pillow or blanket fort, there may be ways to make reading a bit more exciting if you have nowhere else to go. Try picking up travel books or books that take place in far-off settings. Personalized Books that make your child the star can be exciting and creative as well. Create snacks and meals that go along with a theme of the book of your child’s choosing. Have your child make additional illustrations for the book of their choice and stick them between the pages for future enjoyment.

Card Games

Whether your kids play Go Fish, a card-matching memory game, or learn a new game entirely, simple card games can help your child’s number and color identification skills as well as their logical reasoning abilities. If you don’t have playing cards, other card sets like Uno, Old Maid, and Blink are great to use too! The great thing about a deck of cards is that you can play multiple games with them depending on your child’s mood. And if they’re feeling extra dextrous, they can also try to build a house of cards! Either way, cards are a great way to pass the time with plenty of options and lots of possibilities.

Indoor Obstacle Course

If your kids are getting antsy, an obstacle course may help them redirect their pent up energy and excitement. Using household furniture, pillows, blankets, toys, hula hoops, exercise balls, mats, and a serious dose of caution, you can create countless different courses for your kids to play through. To make things more interesting, create a bit of a challenge. Create rules for specific pieces of furniture that dictate how your child will get around it. For example, if there is a chair in the obstacle course, kids will have to either walk around it, sit on it on one side before getting off the other side, or walk over it. For items like hula hoops, have your kids hula hoop a specific number of times before moving into the next obstacle.

Virtual Field Trips For Kids

Posted on | by KD Novelties
Virtual Field Trips from Home

Virtual field trips for kids are perfect when they find themselves cooped up indoors for too long, and they start to get restless. If your little ones are limited to the house and school is no longer in session, there are still ways your kids can get an enriching learning experience while going on adventures at the same time.

Whether they want to explore music, art, history, or even see some animals, there are plenty of virtual field trips for kids and tours. These adventures you and your kids can check out for a seriously engaging experience that you won’t even need to get off the couch for.

Live Stream Some Critters

Many zoos are now offering livestream channels of their animals for anyone to take a look. Like going to the zoo in person, keep in mind that the animals may not always be in view of the camera! While zoo livestreams often go viral when a baby is about to be born, you can take a look at what any of the animals are doing whenever you want. Some zoos offering livestreams and other virtual tours include the San Diego Zoo, the Cincinnati Zoo, and the National Zoo.

If you’re interested in heading underwater, you can also check out the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the National Aquarium to see how the otters, penguins, sharks, and octopuses are doing.

Spend the Day at the Museum

Whether you head on over to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History to explore the dinosaur exhibit or use your mobile device to transport you to the Louvre in Paris to see some of the world’s most significant pieces of art, there is plenty to choose from when it comes to virtual museum tours. Several other museums are highlighting their collections online, including The British Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, NASA, The Vatican Museums and many more.

Schedule Some Time Travel

Google’s Arts & Culture page allows you to globetrot like never before, letting you explore the mirrored halls of the Palace of Versailles in France to the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt – and all before lunch, too! Whether you access Google’s Arts & Culture through a browser or their mobile app, you can take tours of countless legendary feats of architecture, both modern and ancient and everything in between.

A Night at the Opera

If you want to work in some classical music, New York’s Metropolitan Opera is live-streaming some of their most notable performances from the last few years at 7:30 PM EST or online at 3:30PM the following day if anything nearing 8PM is too late for your kiddies to be awake. You can also get free access to the Berlin Philharmonic‘s entire catalog of concerts or check out the highlights of the London Symphony Orchestra.