Looking for activities to keep your children happy can be tricky at the best of times, but after nearly twelve months of being stuck inside, you might be running low on ideas. Many of us here at The Norwich School of Hair & Beauty are parents, so we have put our heads together to come up with a list of our favourite child-friendly activities.
All of us here at The Norwich School of Hair & Beauty are very creative, artistic people so we love getting stuck into some fantastic arts and crafts projects with our children. It’s a great way to have some quality time together, enables brain development and helps children express themselves. Read on to find out how you can keep your children craft-happy over the next few weeks.
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Arts and crafts activities also help your children to develop fine motor skills and ability to problem-solve. With so many excellent advantages to getting stuck into some arts and crafts activities, where should you start this lockdown?
One of our favourite activities to do with our children is to make forts. It’s a classic we know, but it is a classic for a reason. Making a fort at home is a great way to keep children busy (and quiet!). Not only is the mess easily tidied up at the end of the day – unlike glitter (the bane of our lives!) and paint – the children can enjoy their fort once they have declared it finished. You can set up a film inside their tent, give them healthy snacks, get the bears involved and even turn it into a teddy bears’ picnic. Wrap off the experience by reading ‘We’re Going On A Bear Hunt’ by Michael Rosen and then watch the new Channel 4 adaptation. If you needed any further encouragement to let your children deconstruct your living room then it’s good to know that fort-building helps children to build creative and analytical skills.
It’s a bit messier, but still one of our favourite activities for children is face painting. Of course, with our impressive skill set here at The Norwich School of Hair & Beauty, you can see why we might love face painting! You can have so much fun with face painting by really letting your imagination go wild. You don’t need to be celebrating anyone’s birthday, be having a party or at a country fair to indulge in your child’s desire to be Spider-Man or a butterfly.
Face painting is a great way to focus a day’s activities around a central theme too. Getting your child(ren) to dress up to match your face painting efforts will add to the overall look of your work. This will also get your children to use their creativity further and can lead to some extra learning opportunities. There are all sorts of fun themed days that you could choose to make face painting the highlight of: a jungle-themed day, an under-the-sea themed day, a safari-themed day, a nature-themed day or a space-themed day. Face painting is a great way to allow your children to develop their imaginations, their creativity and decision making as well as letting them express their individuality.
Baking cookies (and decorating them) is another classic activity to get your children involved in the kitchen. It’s a great rainy day activity that might just fan the fire of any budding chefs in your family. You can also theme your cookies around anything that the children are learning in school or any other activities that they might enjoy.
Here at The Norwich School of Hair & Beauty we know that things have been tough for a lot of people and will continue to be so for a long time. That’s why we are celebrating all of the little events like Burn’s Night and Valentine’s Day in the calendar this year as a way of cheering ourselves up. You can do the same thing with your little ones without splashing the cash. You can use items around your home like newspapers, junk mail and wastepaper to create paper chains and hanging decorations to deck out your home for the event. Colour in the paper or draw designs on them with crayons/felt tips/pencils and teach your children about the origins of the day. After that, watch a relevant film or TV show, have a themed dinner (heart-shaped pizzas anyone?), then round off the day with a themed bedtime story.
Another great way to use paper that might otherwise just go in the recycling is to do some origami. There are lots of great tutorials online for free to watch with your children to get some helpful pointers on the sorts of things you can make together. As with the other activities we have looked at, you can also theme your origami creations around what your children have been studying in school or learning about at home.
We love that by using waste paper you are also doing your bit to help save the planet! If you want more activities to use up all of that waste paper that gets delivered to your home, you can also make masks with leftover card and paper. Alternatively, your children could make robots and rockets. Save empty cereal packets, loo roll and kitchen roll holders and wrapping paper tubes so that your children have plenty to play with when they sit down and get crafting!
Our final activities that use things you have lying around at home are making DIY Tissue Box Monsters and DIY Jellyfish. These are great craft projects for children that can be combined with all sorts of other themed activities. You could make the DIY jellyfish on an under-the-sea themed day, complete with under-the-sea face painting, watching Disney’s The Little Mermaid and reading the original Hans Christian Andersen mermaid story at bedtime.
The DIY tissue box monsters project is great at Halloween and any other time of the year! Read some monster-themed books, watch Monsters Inc. and get them to write an acrostic poem about a monster, drawing a picture of their monster underneath. (Acrostic poems are the ones that spell out a word when you read down the page looking at the first letter of each sentence.)
We hope that we have given you plenty of activities to keep your little ones happy and you sane over the next few weeks!
Get in touch with The Norwich School of Hair & Beauty to find out more about any of our courses. Call us on 01603 928900 today.
