It’s been more than one year since World Health Organization has raised the alarms on Covid19. If this pandemic has been very challenging for us adults, imagine how it is for our kids. It’s been more than one year of staying home, online classes, and no physical interaction with their classmates, playmates, and families. Who knows what the effects of this in their lives?
What we can do for now as parents and caregivers is to take care of their overall wellbeing and make staying home fun for kids. I’m not an expert on this, but as a parent, these are five things we do for our daughter.
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Play Online Games
According to Common Sense media, kids between 0 to 8 years old spend around two and half hours online and 39 minutes on YouTube in 2020. We cannot deny that kids enjoy playing online or digital games as much as we probably enjoy playing console games when we were kids. But we should also be choosy in the games that they play. I often play with my daughter so that I can see if there are ads which are not safe for kids. I often try the games first before letting my daughter play them. She’s very fond of the Powerpuff Girls and My Little Pony.
There are games available from Play Store and Google Play which you can download on your kid’s tablet of phone. To further keep my child’s identity anonymous, I create a fake persona. This way, it can’t be connected to her real name and address. We also closely monitor games with chat features or never let our child play this at all.
There are also online games you can play on your personal computer. I found the online games at Plays.org are engaging and fun and they have a wide selection of games including educational puzzles. The advantage of this site is that you don’t need to download or register to start playing. And best of all, there’s no Ads! We particularly liked the Powerpuff Girls games , of course.
Start a Journal or Drawing Book
Our daughter is a second grader and can already write very well. This may be a good time to let your child start with journaling, if you haven’t already. No need to buy an expensive journal, any notebook will do. Just encourage your child to write what they think and feel. This will be something to look back to when the pandemic is over. Your kids will also learn how to express themselves which is a good way for us to know what’s going on their mind.
My daughter’s former pre-school has come up with a nice journal, The Happy Kids Journal. It encourages kids to write their goals or the things they want to accomplish for the day. It taches kids to be grateful by encouraging them to list down the things they are grateful for. At the end of the day, kids will have to choose the emoji that best describes their day and the highlight of their day. Parents are also encouraged to support their child by signing an agreement to give a reward to the child once they finished it. If you’re from the Philippines, you can get in touch with Bright Kids Preschool to order a copy of the Happy Kids Journal.
If your child is into drawing, you can also encourage them with a sketchbook or drawing book. Our daughter has a knack for drawing so we buy her drawing books and sketch books. Looking at her drawings is also like reading her journal. It’s giving us valuable insights into her thoughts and emotions.
Gabby’s Pinky Pie drawing
Fun Learning Activities
Staying home doesn’t mean we should be sedentary. Take this opportunity to encourage kids to do outdoor activities in your garden or backyard. Teach kids about plants and how they grow through gardening. They may also be encouraged to eat vegetables if they’re the ones who plant them.
We can also teach our kids to love nature and become naturalists. Let them explore your garden, pond, or backyard. Don’t be afraid to let them play with dirt. Let them observe the plants and animals on the ground, water and the birds. You can use a magnifying glass to observe the insects on the ground or look at the parts of a flower. There are also birds in the city that kids can observe with a binocular. There are also very cheap microscope for kids that you can buy so that kids can take a closer look at things around them.
We’ve also made Science experiments at home and document them in our YouTube channel. Learning should never stop even if kids stopped going to school physically.
Learn a New Skill
Another thing to keep kids occupied is to let them learn a new skill. Let them learn to play an instrument, painting, coding, singing, among others. Let them find their interest by giving them learning opportunities. Before the pandemic, we let our daughter attend a summer art workshop and now she’s doing digital drawings and short animation videos. We bought a drawing tablet for beginner so she can further hone her talent in digital drawing. Our KidTechLab YouTube channel is full of her animation videos which she did all by herself. Whatever new skill your child will learn, the important thing is they enjoy doing it.
Reward Household Chores
This may be the least fun thing to do at home but it’s important to teach our kids to become responsible adults when they grow up. We can gamify doing household chores so that kids will look forward doing them like giving them rewards or badges for finishing a task. For example, they can only play online games if they fixed their beds or washed the dishes. They can have pets only if they will be the ones to feed and take care of them. These are simple tasks but will already teach kids how to be responsible.
These are just some ideas and may not work for everyone. Parenting is trial and error and there’s no one rule that fits everyone. One thing is for sure though, our kids need our support during this pandemic more than ever. How about you? What do you do to make staying home fun for kids?
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