How to Keep Your Kids Entertained During School Holidays

“I’m bored!” – A phrase many parents will hear during school holidays.

When the holidays arrive, it can be a great time to spend some quality and fun time with your children, but it can also be frustrating.

You don’t want to take them to the same park every day, or spend lots of money on theme parks, but you still want to keep them from wasting their time off school watching TV and sighing.

Here are some easy and inexpensive ways to keep kids entertained this holiday.

Get cooking

Go through cookbooks or recipe websites with your children and decide on something to make. Encourage your kids to help write the shopping list and think of what ingredients they’ll need to make their chosen food.

Go shopping for the ingredients, cook the recipe and eat it. It may sound simple but kids love to be included and feel involved in things, especially if it can be messy and creative.

Go into the garden

If you have a garden why not allocate a small place that is just for your kids to plant and grow anything they like?

If you don’t have a garden you could use some cleaned yogurt pots or small jars to grow some plants. You could use half a washed egg shell with some damp cotton wool and watercress seeds in.

Let your children draw a silly face and watch as their egg turns into a head with a funny face on.

Play time

A great way to get kids’ imagination flying is to let them perform a play.

Get some old clothes, bags, hats and shoes for costumes and let their imagination go wild. Let them write down a storyline to act out.

Maybe set a performance time for before or after dinner and seat the whole family down to watch the performance.

Build a den

If the weather is good, you could even risk doing this outside in your garden. All you need is some boxes or sofa cushions, a few blankets and bedsheets, and a bit of imagination. Clothes pegs are a handy way to keep the den together.

Play Poohsticks

This game came from the famous Winnie The Pooh books and is now a worldwide activity. All you need are some sticks and a running stream or river with a bridge over it.

Just throw your sticks in at one side and then rush to the other to see whose stick comes through first.

Go pond dipping

Get your kids to learn a little about nature just by visiting your local pond: all you need is a net or plastic carton and a local pond.

Sweep the net or carton firmly through the water and then transfer the creatures using a plastic spoon into a separate carton filled with clean water. You’ll be amazed at what’s in there.

Use some wildlife books or the internet to identify what types of insect and pond life they find.

These ideas just go to show that you don’t need much money or to go very far to keep kids interested and happy. Just like imagination, a little goes a long way.