Five fun activities to do at home with your kids during lock-down

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Stuck at home with your little ones and not sure what to do to keep them busy, entertained, preoccupied, and educationally stimulated?

We caught up with Sasha-Lee Taylor, a 23-year old entrepreneur, model and philanthropist, who continues to make the lives many children in South Africa just a little better, buy offering them an opportunity to gain one of life’s most basic skills – being able to read. She wrote and launched an educational children book called “Learn to Read, Learn to Lead“. With our country currently in lock-down, we asked her to share her top five activities to do at home to keep your kids busy and entertained … ones that need minimal supplies and effort.

  1. GET READING!

Reading stimulates a child’s imagination and mind. Obviously she thinks Learn to Read, Learn to Lead is a great option, as it offers an educational learning aspect as well as a fun story-line. However, if you don’t have a copy, then grab your child’s favourite book, read it with them, and afterwards have them draw their favourite character by using their imagination and what they think he or she looks like.

  1. BAKING DIFFERENT SHAPED COOKIES

A great way to include an educational lesson into a daily fun task is to bake cookies in all different shapes – circle, square, triangle, rectangle, heart etc.

Once they’ve baked and cooled down, ice them in different colours and have your child match the different shapes to different colours as set out by you. So for example, tell them to ice the heart in red icing, the square in blue and so on.

All you need is a basic cookie mixture or recipe, a baking tray, some cookie cutters and icing mixture. Everyone can get involved with this and enjoy them as a family afterwards.

  1. MAKE DREAM CATCHERS.

Get those creative juices flowing by allowing your kids to creating their own dream catchers for their rooms. Simply google basic templates and draw your own if you can, let the children get creative and then hang them in a special place in their rooms.

What you need: You need paper plates, cardboard, paint, wool/string and things to decorate them with like glitter, beads, stickers etc.

This would be great to help kids get creative and it takes up quite a bit of time. Be sure to work outdoors or use a plastic tablecloth as things may get a bit messy.

  1. OUTDOOR CHALK DRAWINGS

This is such a great way to not only get your kids to enjoy the outdoors, but to have fun with colour! Let your kids channel their inner Picasso by drawing on the bricks in the driveway or a designated area. Alternatively, you can outline a drawing such as a rainbow or the South African flag, and have them colour it in using the different colours available. You can also encourage them to draw something like a hopscotch grid, which would get them active as well.

What you need: Different coloured chalk.

  1. MAKE A BIRD FEEDER

Teaching your kids about animals is an important part of environmental sciences, as well as conservation. What better way than to instil compassion for animals as well as develop DIY skills than to build their own bird feeder?  You can play around with your own design or research a basic design online. Children love being in nature and they can watch the birds come eat from their feeder afterwards.

What you need: You would need a plastic bottle, bird seed, chopsticks and string to hang it.

Details: To learn more about Sasha-Lee’s ‘Learn to Read, Learn to Lead’ book, contact Sasha-Lee on [email protected]

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