Giant List of Ideas for Being Home With Kids
Suggestions from the Princess Awesome & Boy Wonder Community
● Have each kid pick a topic they'd like to learn about and spend 30 mins each day on that topic
● Read all the books
● Bake something every day
● Have each kid write a letter and/or emails to a different friend or family member each day
● Use all of our building toys on one giant structure
● Races of various kinds in the backyard (hopping on one foot, crab walk, walking backwards, etc.)
● Try stop motion animation with play dough
● Facetime grandparents a lot
● Inventory the plants & wildlife (from bugs on up) in your yard.
● Learn the parts of plants/flowers & how they function (bonus if they learn the Latin names).
● Write a short story & illustrate it.
● GoNoodle! Great for guided movement, relaxation, etc.
● Board games, card games
● Legos
● Card making/scrapbooking projects (mostly for me but kids can do it too).
● Getting the garden ready, we need to weed and work the ground. I might get seeds and we'll set up to have our own starts this year.
● Make tents and reading caves : )
● Have a shadow show in the reading tent (we used blankets over chairs or a table)
● Get binoculars and learn about the birds near your house, look them up on google and search for their birdcalls on YouTube
● Many educational websites are waving fees if your students school is closed. Here’s a list of all of them.
● Watch all the hand washing videos & vote on your favorite. Discuss why each good, helpful, funny. The Holderness parody one is hilarious, the Vietnam Tiktok one is great choreography, some have good songs etc.
● Pick your favorite song with a 20 second refrain or verse perfect for hand washing length of time.
● Family puzzles. Ones that are 500-1000 pieces and a challenging but not frustrating picture
● Team up and really clean and organize each kid's space, making a donation box for each. Parents are included.
● Have a board game day
● Kids can also make their own games! Board games, card games, you name it!
● Write a story cooperatively. One person picks a character and the other picks a setting and then go gangbusters together.
● Any and all art is fun at home: beading, painting, drawing, play dough or kinetic sand, sewing, etc. when my daughter was young we could do art all day.
● Massive board game tournament with all the (mostly forgotten) board games we own!
● If your school is going on #quarantine and running #schoolonline, get #GlobalKids for the special price of just $10.98. Take a screen-free, curiosity + creativity boosting, global empathy + engagement trip around the world, from comfort of your home
● Zumba or Dance-along videos on YouTube
● I've had them draw maps of places and then make directions from one place to another to see if someone else could follow it.
● Scavenger hunts, indoor treasure hunts where they follow clues through the house to a "treasure" at the end (could be candy, a movie, whatever), and a lot of charades.
● I made videos with my 3rd grade daughter teaching kids how to write code. Check out the videos here
● There are a few easy "kitchen chemistry" type science experiments that are easy to do, like making slime, baking soda and vinegar reaction, etc. We put food coloring under the baking soda in a mini muffin pan and used Pipette to drop vinegar in and then you can see the color!
● Last summer we did an experiment to learn what each ingredient did for a cake (so we made one following the recipe, one without eggs, one without milk, etc.). We then compared and contrasted the different cakes ... Then we ate a lot of weird cake.
● There are a bunch of ideas on the lab section of our webpage! And we have letters from women in STEM around the world!
● popcorn + movie marathon
● Listen to kid podcasts - we love story pirates and smash boom best.
● Declutter toys!
● Have an Olympics with a bunch of events competitions - funny ones, helpful ones like cleaning and really fun ones like minute to win in style.
● Learn new card games
● Lots of art projects!
● Dig up all the activity books, presents, etc that never got played with, and use those!
● There’s always time tested building a tent in the house with blankets and chairs. Great for just before nap time.
● Do a study on planets, then have the kids create their own planets- how big is it, where in the universe is it located, atmosphere conditions, can it sustain life, how long is a day/year, name it, etc. You could even spread the planets out around the house to show "approx." distance from each other. Watch this to learn about relative distance
● Design a new space craft, draw plans, then create out of legos or household items. Spend some time pretending you're on different planets with different gravity, you could seriously spend a whole week on just fun space activities. But that's not limited to space- these ideas would work for animals, geography, body systems, historical events/time periods, etc. Beyond that, do some fun physics experiments like making a bridge out of straws, egg drop protectors, paper airplanes, etc.
● PuppetMaster: an app where you can animate anything from a drawing to a stuffed animal.
● Puzzle races: put several puzzles (20+ piece puzzles) in a paper bag and shake it up. Pour pieces out and give each person the puzzle box they are to put together. Go! (Cooperation tends to be a result as pieces are traded.)
● Dig through cabinets and figure out recipes for that thing you got at the grocery store and thought "this is interesting surely it can be used for something!" And then make it!
● Audible!