7 Kid-Friendly Activities Your Kids Can Do While You Work From Home

7 Kid-Friendly Activities Your Kids Can Do While You Work From Home

Keep your kids busy with these kid-friendly activities.

According to recent research, about one in five American parents are stay-at-home moms or dads. Working parents tend to underestimate the work these parents do on a daily basis, but with the stay-at-home orders around the U.S. right now, more people are working from home than ever before. As you’ve discovered after just a single day of working from home with children, you’ve definitely got your work cut out for you!!

Luckily, there are ways to keep your little ones occupied while you do your job from your couch or dining room table. Read on to discover 7 kid-friendly activities your children are sure to love!

1. Books (or Audiobooks)

If your children love to absorb a good story, it could be tempting to stick them in front of the television and call it a day. However, this can harm your child’s educational and social development. Reading, on the other hand, promotes critical thinking and allows children to exercise their imagination.

Give your child a stack of age-appropriate books on a variety of subjects. Fantasy, realistic fiction, or nonfiction about their favorite subjects—make sure it’s all there. Let them choose what they want to read and leave them to experience an amazing story!

If your child is too young to read on their own, audiobooks are an awesome alternative. You can put them in an adjacent room or give them headphones so you don’t need to deal with distracting sounds. After they listen and when your work is done, talk with your child about the story they’ve heard or the subject they learned about!

2. Drawing and Painting

In addition to reading and thinking about books, drawing and painting are great ways to develop a child’s critical thinking skills and imagination. Find some non-toxic markers or paints, as well as crayons. For added fun, you can get a big art kit online that contains oil pastels and colored pencils in addition to these materials.

If you want to add some extra fun to your child’s art time, get some posterboard delivered to your house. This will let your kid draw larger pieces of art, add more detail to whatever they want to draw, and experiment with making handprints in paint!

3. Shaving Cream Art

Shaving cream art is another fun and unique way to allow your child to express their creativity. All you’ll need to do is put a mess of shaving cream down for your children to play with and allow them to sculpt to their heart’s content. This is a simple pleasure that will keep kids occupied and out of trouble for hours on end.

Kids can feel messy, which they love, while not leaving behind a mess for you to clean! Just lay an easy-to-wash foam mat or an unfolded cardboard box on the floor where your children are playing. That way, you can rinse it off or throw it away when they’re done. For added creativity (in addition to these benefits), you can use marbled paper so kids can experiment with color!

4. Slime Time

Slime is a lot of fun for kids to make and play with. Before you start your work for the day, work with your child to make non-toxic slime. This is easy to make and won’t take you very long. It is also a fun way to bond with your child and get them to feel loved and happy before you go off to work!

Create slime in whatever color your child likes best; all you’ll need to do is use different color food coloring when making it!

5. Bubble Wrap Fun

Everyone loves popping Bubble Wrap. If this is a popular way to relieve stress for adults (probably including yourself), then imagine the fun kids can have with it.

Instead of just handing them small sheets and letting them sit there and pop the bubbles, order some large sheets that have bubbles the size of their hands and feet. This will let them have fun and keep active by running and jumping on the Bubble Wrap. If you want to play around with color, you can get tinted blue, yellow, or pink Bubble Wrap and place all of them on the floor so your children can choose what to play with!

6. Building Blocks

Every kid loves to build. That’s why building blocks are and always have been popular with children. You can get them in a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors so your children can create elaborate block castles and fortresses. You can also give them some small dolls or action figures so they can play pretend with made-up characters!

Plus, while your children play with blocks, you can take care of yourself. There’s basically nothing for you to set up for them to partake in this incredibly low-risk activity, so there’s nothing to stress over!

7. Activity Stations With Timers

If you want to keep your child occupied for a long period of time or if you have a big family with many children to entertain, there’s nothing as effective as making activity stations with timers. You can incorporate any and all of the above activities into these activity stations and have your kids rotate so everyone gets a chance to try each activity.

Since children have short attention spans, this is a good way to keep them occupied and focused on the activities you’ve set up. Different stations mean they won’t become bored or complacent after doing one thing for too long. Rotating every fifteen to twenty minutes is a great time frame to ensure kids get enough time to engage with each activity, but not so much time that they become antsy.

This is also a fun way to give kids the calming effect of routine during these uncertain times so they don’t become anxious due to the changes going on in their lives.

More Fun With Kid-Friendly Activities

While working from home and social distancing can be a challenge, keeping kids happy and eliminating distractions is easier than you might think.

Now that you have some awesome kid-friendly activities under your belt that will keep your children out of your hair as you work from home, it’s time to uncover more tips on how to maintain your well-being during the quarantine. Click here to learn what physical, social, and psychological well-being means, as well as how to keep yours in check.

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