Activities at Home to Keep Children and Young People Busy

Posted on 26th March 2020 by Beth Owen

There are lots of different activities you can do at home with children and young people to help keep them busy. We’ve put some of our favourite ideas below to get you started!

Paint some pebbles

Why not grab some nice smooth pebbles and some acrylic paint and let your young people get creative! Painting can be a great way to pass some time, and is super easy to do. When it comes to what to paint, let their imaginations run free! You could even suggest a theme to get them started, something like ‘nature’, ‘school’ or ‘animals’. Make sure you varnish the pebbles when they have dried to make it shiny and protect the painting!

Make some positivity posters

*Create bright and colourful displays for your window!*

In the strange times that we are living in, spreading some positivity seems like a really nice idea! With most of us being stuck at home, though, there are limited ways of doing this. Lots of people all over the country are helping to spread cheer by filling their windows with rainbows and positive messages! So why not set your young person up with the tools that they can get involved? Our lovely Resource Worker Claire created the one above with her girls at home!

Listen to an audio book

Activities at home - audio books — *The Terrible Triplets* *by David Walliams*

David Walliams has announced that he will be releasing a free audio story each day for the next 30 days for school aged children to listen to. David Walliams is an expert on writing stories for children, so you can bet that these will be something for young people to enjoy!

You can click this link to listen to them: https://www.worldofdavidwalliams.com/elevenses/

Watch something educational

*There are lots of fun documentaries young people can watch!*

You might think that letting your young person sit in front of the TV or PC to watch something is a bad idea, but that’s not always the case. There are so many fantastic educational documentaries they can watch when they need a bit of ‘down time’. The BBC iPlayer and Netflix both have a great selection, such as Blue Planet, Planet Earth and Frozen Planet!

Make some paper crafts

*Young people can create some great artwork using coloured paper!*

There are lots of different crafts you can do with paper! It’s something fun and engaging to do, such as origami, paper planes, or a paper dream-catcher. There is a great website that collects together lots of different paper craft ideas for young people to do.

Head over to https://flintobox.com/blog/do-it-yourself/paper-crafts-kids where you can select an age range to help identify more suitable crafts for young people.