Activities for tween + teen at home?

[Sourcat]

I work from home (freelance) and have struggled to get much work done since lockdown (am in Europe).

Now it's the summer holidays and there are still another six weeks left; if I leave my dcs to their own devices, they will just play fortnite from the moment they get up until they go to sleep. So we have obviously limited the hours they can spend on screens, and have also said there should be 2 screen-free days a week.

But when they're not on their screens they just mope around whingeing. I say go and meet your friends - friends are either away on holiday or playing fortnite Occasionally they do manage to get a group of friends together and go and play football for an afternoon.

They are both dyslexic and have never enjoyed reading, so they won't just hang out and read for pleasure. They've lost interest in anything that's not screen-related. They both play in football clubs but training is only a couple of afternoons a week at the moment.

If I'm not providing entertainment or organizing something, nothing happens. I've got a big backlog of work and I need solid blocks of time to get on with it - we're also having building work done so there's endless things to do there too.

I said they should come up with a list of projects to do for when they're bored - they used to enjoy creative stuff, making animations etc., not any more - but they can't and don't. But I really need them to be able to occupy themselves independently even when screens are off!

Any thoughts? Ideas? They're 11 and 15.

I just really don't want them playing sodding fortnite 12 hours a day which is their first and only choice of activity. (So depressing)

And we do all go swimming or out for an ice cream or whatever, but they whinge then too. (I've created monsters.)

Bike rides?
Cooking
Photography (with the use of their screens they could do some pretty cool editing)
Longer Chores (e.g paint garden fence, up to you if you offer financial incentive!)
Or my personal favourite, ‘clear out your bedroom, eBay anything you don’t want, you can keep the profit’.

2 screen free days a week would kill mine, and they are a similar age to yours, although I would love to do it just to see what happens😂

Sorry, no great suggestions here - my 11yo builds Lego, cooks, draws, tinkers with his scooter. Often he won't choose to go on the PlayStation at all. The 14yo...less so. He is out with friends a lot but when he's in the house screens are the default.

There will be lots of people along shortly to suggest really wholesome activities that my ds would just a turn his nose up at. It's tough.

Thanks - glad I'm not completely on my own with the battle against screens. Bike riding tricky because we live very centrally in a capital city, so it involves negotiating heavy traffic. Cooking is out at the moment because of the building work - though I think this is a good idea for when the kitchen's back to normal.

Photography/film-making is good too; my oldest has a drone and edited some amazing footage together last year from our holidays. He says he's not inspired here but perhaps I should send him out with the drone anyway (May not be legal in the city?)

I wish they would develop an interest in some sort of build-a-monument-out-of-matchsticks project that would take weeks and they could just keep going back to when they're bored. Unfortunately they have the attention span of two little gnats. Sigh.