Tag: keeping kids busy

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.

Brain and Body: Engaging Indoor Activities for Kids

Posted on | by KD Novelties

 

As the weather prepares to switch gears, playing outside will become less and less of an option for kids when it comes to playtime. Keeping kids entertained indoors can be difficult, especially when they are more likely to reach for a mobile device to play a game or ask to watch TV or a movie. Parents can encourage kids to read, write, or be creative, but many of these activities are sedentary. While they may be enriching in other ways, kids still need to find ways to be active even when the weather doesn’t allow it. Here are some engaging indoor activities that get kids moving and keep them entertained.

Mastering Math and the Obstacle Course

Obstacle courses are always fun. They’re mainstays at themed birthday venues and they’re every kids favorite unit in gym class. You can create your own at-home obstacle course using string and household furniture. But to make it more engaging, you can also use – playing cards! Using playing cards or index cards with numbers or functions like plus signs and subtraction signs, will challenge kids to complete certain equations or create a path through the obstacle course that allow them to collect the cards they need to solve the problem. Kids can pretend they are super spies or secret hackers looking for the right code to unlock the secret at the end of the course, or at least earn themselves a snack.

Going Wild

Animal books are great gateways to learning and reading. Animals are diverse and many children like looking at the pictures or learning about where animals live, what they eat etc. You can learn all about animals, whether it be via a book or the internet, but you can also incorporate some stretching into the mix – challenge kids to mimic the animals they’re learning about. Stretching can help muscles but getting into these animal poses can also require some creativity and brain power as well. According to Integrated Learning Strategies Learning Corner, animal poses like a horse trot, worm crawl, or the crab walk, can be great for executive functioning within the brain, regulating emotions, and practicing gross and fine motor skills. Plus, they’re just fun to do!

 

Balloon Ping Pong

Ping-pong indoors can be dangerous, but not if you change up your game equipment. Swap out a ping-pong for a balloon and your ping-pong paddle for a paper plate attached to a popsicle stick. There are plenty of other games that can be made indoor-safe as long as you trade in the traditional tools, especially hard balls that could potentially break household items or hurt others, for soft, plush things instead like pillows, poufs, balloons and other materials. These may be simple, but sports-related activities get kids up and moving but they also help them hone their hand-eye coordination skills, build better interpersonal relationships, and encourage good sportsmanship.