16 Fun Activities to Keep Kids Engaged at Home
As parents, we are always caught up in the question of how to keep kids engaged at home. At school, children have a structure but at home, they want to relax and enjoy their time, yet children being children, they are easily bored and distracted. Add to this the reduced attention spans with increasingly digital and vicarious lifestyles.
In such a scenario, we are constantly looking for fun activities for kids at home that can not only keep the kids engaged, but also create special memories and bonds. Through activities we can learn a lot about our child’s interests, strengths and areas that need more support. This time spent doing things together fosters strong, enriching relationships, and provides a great opportunity to shape a child’s character.
How to Engage Kids at Home:
To help you make this time stress-free, we have put together a list of some fun, easy and creative activities that give you lots of options for all kinds of interests.
1) Puzzles or Riddles:
Puzzles or riddles are a great way to challenge the kids and pique their curiosity. Whether these are crossword puzzles, sudoku, brain games, or even jigsaw puzzles, they can keep children engrossed for hours, and sometimes days. Choose a puzzle slightly beyond your kid’s comfort level to engage their deep thinking, analytical mind, logical reasoning and problem-solving abilities. Riddles are also a great way to help kids develop creative, non-linear thinking. These are great family activities during holidays or a fun one-on-one activity between you and your kid.
2) Imaginary Play
Pretend play is one of the key strategies that help your child express their inner world. Children can build scenarios and stay immersed in them for hours. Whether they play Doctor, School, Teacher or House with their dolls or action figures, imaginary play is a strong representation of your child’s imagination and their emotions, the challenges they face and how they deal with them. Pretend play also gives you a peek into how your child processes events around them, who their role models are, and how they view the adults around them. Allow your child uninterrupted time to create this imaginary world, help them with the props they need and watch the magic unfold.
3) Play Along Stories
Another way to strengthen your child’s imagination and fuel their creativity is to ask them to create or enact crafted stories as you play along with them. The stories can have imaginary characters or be based on their favourite superheroes, as they work their magic to immerse you into their fantasy world – a world where things work differently and contemporary structure does not apply. Cardboard boxes could be skyscrapers or underground dungeons, toys and pets could be audience or actors, and plots could be familiar or completely outlandish. Play-along stories are a great device to teach your child to think creatively and outside the box.
4) Jam Sessions
Impromptu jam sessions are a powerful way to release stress and pent-up energy. Play your child’s favourite music and shake a leg with them. This enjoyable short activity can release all that stored energy which makes your kid cranky. Music is not only a great outlet, it is also known to aid brain development in kids. The movement and physical activity help get those endorphins going, work up an appetite and can be the precursor to some quiet downtime. If your child plays an instrument or sings, these jam sessions could be about showcasing their skills, improvising on their learning and getting creative.
5) Math in Life
A great way to get kids comfortable with math is to use it as a game in their day-to-day lives. Fractions can be taught by dividing a cupcake among 3 kids, and division can be explained by counting and dividing magnets among siblings. Measurement can be a fun activity where kids measure and list all things a certain size, they see around the house. For example, can the kids find and list all the things that are an inch long in the house? For younger kids, the simple act of counting and sorting things can be an immersive activity. Ask your pre-schooler to count all things a certain colour or shape in your house and watch the hours melt away.
6) Nurture Talent and Develop Skills
Start by observing your child. Many children start demonstrating their inherent skills, talents or strengths in their day-to-day activities. Does your child find it easy to balance themselves on things, can they pick out the subtle flavours in food, do they have a keen eye for colour or are they good at a sport? Sometimes you might find that your child enjoys a certain kind of activity more – maybe they tune into music or can draw or colour for hours. As a parent, encourage and support your child in honing these interests and skills at home through fun activities can help them identify their natural interests and talents.
7) Private Science Lab
Home can be fertile ground for children to experience many natural science and experimental concepts first-hand. Observing plants through their growth phases, seeds to saplings, insects like bugs and caterpillars, astronomy and star gazing, moon cycles, seasons and colours can all be valuable lessons in observations, patience, growth, change and environment for your child. Armed with a few tools like magnifying glasses, bowls, beakers, and other household items such as dish soap, corn syrup, oil etc you recreate some exciting experiments available via the internet at home.
8) World of Books
Introduce your child to books. They open up a whole different world for your kid, exposing them to narratives beyond their immediate surroundings. Whether they are fantasy, adventure, culture, mythology-based fiction or even biographies, books have a way of fuelling your child’s imagination by introducing them to multiple possibilities. Children benefit by learning how to express themselves better, develop comprehension skills and improved vocabulary. With an interest in reading, you can also encourage your kids to write their own stories, helping them develop stronger imagination and creative skills.
9) Art and Craft
Whether you invest in new art supplies and craft sets or upcycle materials and waste from your home, spending time on art or craft activities is a great way to engage your child at home. Creating unique works of art or labour of love items gives you and your child some productive time together. Creating nurtures a sense of accomplishment in children, at the same time helps them develop skills and learn idea execution. Working on art or creating teaches children the value of practice, commitment, accepting failures and learning from mistakes. They could be drawing, painting, doing papercraft or origami, quilling, sewing, knitting or creating things out of waste such as cartons, paper bags, shoeboxes or old clothes. Upscaling and creating things out of waste also teaches kids to see value in everything.
10) Cooking and Household Chores
Getting together with your children to cook something is a great way to teach them to be self-reliant. The deeply engaging, sensorial experience of preparing dough, washing fruits and vegetables, filling the baking moulds etc. can be a fully immersive experience for your child. You could use this time to talk to them about the nutritional benefits of some foods like why are fruits and vegetables so colourful or tell them the advantages of limiting the consumption of some foods such as sugar-heavy cookies. Similarly, asking your child to help you with household chores such as laundry, dusting or folding clothes gives you quality time together and teaches them to appreciate everything you do for them. Choose safe and age-appropriate tasks for them to pitch in. Remember engaging and acknowledging your child’s effort are the main aims of the activity, not training them to do things perfectly.
11) Hobbies
Have your child pursue a hobby from an early age. Working on something other than their academics helps in the holistic and all-round development of children. Hobbies can range from sports and extracurricular activities like dance, art, music etc. to interest based activities such as stamp collection, cooking, photography etc. Pursuing hobbies teaches children to put in their best effort and the value of hard work. Working on their hobbies together is another way parents can engage their children at home. Doing something you know your child is passionate about helps build a strong bond between parents and their kids.
12) Gardening
An activity that engages all senses, and encourages children to understand the rhythms of nature, Gardening has many benefits for the kids. It is an activity that keeps kids engaged over a longer period of time, teaching them the value of balance, patience and timing. From planting seeds or saplings to nurturing the plants with regular care, watching them grow and sprout new leaves, flowers and fruits, gardening offers many valuable lessons in responsibility, caring and importance of nature. The best part? kids get to watch the plants grow and bloom as a result of their efforts.
13) Designing Experiments
A sure shot way to answer your child’s numerous questions is to engage them in creating experiments to address their inquisitiveness. Kids learn far more through exploration and experimentation than through theoretical responses. Why does the milk boil over and not water, what happens when you add salt to soda, what dissolves faster in water – sugar or salt? Questions like these are easily answered by designing experiments with materials available at home. As a fun preface to the experiments you can ask kids to suggest a hypothesis and their reasoning behind it, see if they got both right or dive into discussions. Home experiments qualify both as an engaging activity and learning experience, making them a win-win for all.
14) Sit and Spot
A fun way to carve out quiet, downtime into an activity. Choose a spot indoors or outdoors with your child and sit there for 5 minutes or more. Observe all that you can around that spot and make a note of it. Have your child do the same. At the end of 5 minutes compare notes on common and unique things you both observed. You can also make it more competitive by seeing who made more observations, or who noticed more things related to a specific aspect. Not only does this activity help your child focus and become observant, but it also teaches them to be more present. Creating a strong bond between parent and child, this activity is the perfect example of dialling down to dial in.
15) Indoor and Outdoor Games
Games are a great way to spend energy and release stress. Whether you engage your kids in active indoor games like The Floor Is Lava, Hide and Seek, or board games like Chess and Monopoly, they prove to be deeply engaging for the kids teaching them the joys of competitiveness, the value of putting in effort and strategic thinking as well as sportsmanship of losing gracefully. Additionally, indoor games allow the whole family to participate together, while improvised games such as pool-noodle-sword-fights or competing to wear most-clothes-under-one-minute help get the creative juices flowing. Outdoor games aid in the physical development of kids, help them build social connections with their peers and learn the values of leadership, camaraderie and teamwork.
16) Free Play
And lastly, allow your child the space and time for unstructured free play. As parents, we often rush to suggest activities to engage our kids when they complain about getting bored. Let your kids get bored at times. Kids often find things to engage themselves in when they feel bored. Bored minds are imaginative, productive and proactive. This helps them hone their creative thinking and builds a spirit of self-dependence. Free play offers children the opportunity to recognise what they enjoy the most and gives them the space to synthesise all that they are busy doing throughout their day.
In the end, it is important to understand that all of these activities are ways to spend quality time with your kids. Whether you do it through reading them stories, doing activities with them, going for a walk or playing a game, time spent with your kids strengthens your bond and helps inculcate many valuable life skills in them. After all experience is the best teacher, and what they learn easily through these experiences will be the lessons that stay with them throughout their life.
Last Updated on July 15, 2024
