A thread to help do more with the kids

[Tamadot]

I thought it might be a good idea to have a thread of support for mums like me who tend to not do much with their kids at home.
I've heard quite a few mums on here say they're happy to take their kids out and about but find it difficult to spend time doing stuff with them at home.

Maybe we can make a commitment to do at least one activity a day with them, or get ideas about things to do?

I really want to try to do more with my lovely boys but I do find it hard. I don't want to ever look back and have regrets that I thought washing the dishes and doing the laundry meant that I put off doing anything with them.

Marking my place as I am so happy to find likeminded people. DS is 2.5, so lovely to be with yet I know I am constantly underperforming when it's just the two of us at home. Am expecting DC2 in August so ideas for indoor activities are a must!

DS does love growing things - Wilkinsons is good for cheap supplies. He likes painting, but I think I need to be more creative/structured sometimes than just letting him splodge - I might try bubble printing tomorrow.

Carrots what did you grow your indoor courgettes in? We grew them on the allotment last year and they looked like they needed quite a bit of earthy floor space.

Ikea do long rolls of art paper too, if you're near one.

carrots Loving the t-shirt idea! That's fab!
Where can you buy fabric pens? And do they come off of skin? My boys like to colour in each other

Silvery the long paper would be another use for your big roll of lining paper from the DIY store.

Reading this for new ideas. I do a lot of activities with my 2.5yr DD, very similiar stuff to theimaginationtree blog but more varied than just crafting stuff really.

I do have a massive craft box and we make all cards for her grandparents/aunts/godparents etc. That way I know I've done something with her, it saves me a bit of money and they get something personal.

I find it easier to do it all around play rather than by activity, early years learning is child led play so I adopted that way. So if my DD starts chattering away about bugs I cut out a butterfly shape, we paint one half, fold press doen etc and hang them up. Or make caterpillars out of concetina'd paper. Then maybe read the hungry caterpillar and look for bugs in the garden.

She harped on about going on a planeone week, I took her to the local airport even if it meant looking at freight/cargo planes it was enough for her. Then i downloaded pictures of vehicles made a big scene of sea, land and sky and she stuck the vehicles on their corresponding areas. We made car tracks by running poundshop cars through paints and making track paintings on paper.

If you take note of this weeks latest interest, its far easier to build around it rather than thinking I'll make cakes, do a painting, etc. I also make sure that we have a visit somewhere each day so we have an outing followed by an activity later on.

Star we just grew the courgettes in pots on the windowsill - I think it would have been about a litre pot (we potted them up a few times). We left one courgette as long as we dared to see how big it would grow and ended up with a marrow. Dcs were very impressed with themselves.

Silvery Hobbycraft do fabric pens, so do Yellow moon I think and they have loads and loads of fun projects if you are not short of cash. I can't remember if they came off skin but that suggests they did or I would remember the trauma.

Some great ideas here.

Ee planted some strawberry plants a few weeks back, that was good fun. Also have been collecting bits of card and containers for months a while, telling ds that we will make a rocket, and haven't got round to it

Perhaps it would help to schedule 'a time' every day to do something, even if it's just stickers or drawing or whatever.

Thanks carrots unfortunately we are always short of cash

geordie My ds1 attends nursery in the afternoons, so I'm thinking 10-11am for activity time.
That way it gives us enough time to wash, dress, have breakfast, they can still watch Shrek whilst I do a quick bit of housework, we can do the activity, then have lunch at 11:15 as normal to be ready to leave for nursery at 12

Thedoctorswife That sounds like a lovely way to do activities with kids. Unfortunately if I took that approach I'd just be focussed on everything dinosaurs, cars and Ben10!

I have never ordered from them for the same reason Silvery.

I think my activity time will have to be after tea as both of mine are at school and also do a few after school activities.

On a Wednesday there just won't be time for one I don't think but we do spend time in the car on a Wednesday so we do at least have a good chat then.

Found some fabric pens on Amazon. There are some for around £5
www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=fabric+pens

Chatting is time very well spent carrots.
I need to do activities in the day with ds2 and after school with ds1. And on the weekends for both.

I won't be doing it every day. I'm thinking 3 times a week.
Ds1 also gets homework twice a week (but don't get me started on that. homework for a 3 year old), so we do have 2 sessions where I sit with him and ds2 does some drawings.

Thanks for that Tam Will order some tomorrow (cba to dig out my bank card now, next time I get off this sofa, I'm going to bed)

silvery ikea do a good range of craft stuff including rolls of paper.

great thread and lots of great ideas

I found I was running out of inspiration with dd (3) so have been trying "themes". First topic we did was bikes so we used a big roll of paper to make a road and cut out pictures to make places along it like a park, cafe etc. Made a model bike, learned a couple of songs about bikes, baked a cake in the shape of a bike, planning to go to transport museum but still haven't managed that yet. Looked for books about bikes at the library. I think it mainly keeps me more engaged and it seems to make it easier to think of things to do.

We are currently doing London as that's where we live, looking at maps, went on London eye and drew pictures of what we saw etc.

The other thing which helps me is to take photos of all of this and one day the activity is sticking them in her scrapbook with captions. Sometimes we read the scrapbook, she loves it as it's all stories about her and what she did.

Love the idea of sticking fabric and wool etc on a life-size figure!

Homework for a 3 year old?

I think some of my activities will have to be games from the games cupboard - on busy nights I could still play connect 4 or a Lego game for 10 minutes.

The bigger craft activities will be for the nights we are at home or the weekends.

One thing we did recently that DS absolutely loved was to collect a load of biggish stones and wash them in a stream, and then take them home and decorate them with paint and glitter to make a little technicolour rockery in the corner of the garden. It was a bit different from normal painting, which invariably ends up with him putting a blob of paint on the paper and driving cars through it, and he's enjoying watching the stones change as the paint is slowly fading and being washed off by the rain.

Orchard games are fab even for very little ones - DS is just 4 and loves Jelly Elephants.

My mum was SAHM and did quite a bit with my sister and me (three year age gap). Up until school our favourite things to do were
"coloured waters" - couple of empty jam jars filled with water, drop of food colouring in each. pour into different jars. repeat until all water brown. Apparently this was great fun? We made skittles vodka together before I went to start uni and my dad thought we'd rediscovered coloured waters - he looked a bit scared!
"lentils" - bag of lentils. different sized jars and lids, and a funnel. and a broom for the floor afterwards
Getting a carnation or a stick of celery and watching it take coloured water up and change colour. Not a long activity particularly, but good to look at for five minutes a day over a few days.

Looking back, they seem ridiculously basic and boring, but apparently kept us occupied for ages!

If you're doing t shirt/bag decorating, we each did a pillowcase one year to use as stockings for Father Christmas. Bit early to get them hyped up now, but maybe pillow cases could be used to gather up toys at the end of the day and return to respective owners?

yourtheoneformefatty we have picked up a few jigsaws from charity shops. We do them until we can do them with our eyes shut, as you say, then return them to the charity shop.

Now and again you get one with a piece missing but if you are still at the stage of fewer pieces then I suppose you could count them first.

Great ideas so thanks to everyone.
I'll report back here tomorrow evening :)

Double some fab ideas there - thank you.

Good luck everyone. Hope you all have lots of fun doing something with your kids :)

What about a home sports day? We made rosettes and then did egg and spoon races, the sack race (using bin bags) and general run about like mad races! You can bring in assorted household items for an obsacle race. It's fun AND it tires them out.

www.naturedetectives.org.uk is a fab site for getting ideas for things to do outside.

Mine are older now (11 and 8) but I always found it easier to persuade them to go on a walk if it was described as something else (a Spring treasure hunt, doing leaf rubbings etc)

I've always found it helps me to be 'topic' based, so focusing on something in the news (e.g. weather, or a volcano, or the royal wedding ) and then link things to that!

We are doing a sports day at the park for DDs 4th birthday party :)