As a parent or guardian of young children who are usually at school, you may be wondering how to keep them busy during days with little daylight and cold, damp weather. Here are some ways to help your child continue to develop their fine and gross motor skills, problem solving skills, and get out some energy to help them stay on their usual sleep schedule. All while bonding as a family!
Streamer Hallway Maze
If you have the space for it, a roll of streamers, and some painters tape you (or any older children in the home) can create a “laser maze”, as seen here. This is a great way to get your kids playing together while using their creativity, spatial awareness, and gross motor skills to plan and execute crawling their way through. If your young child has trouble keeping their balance or not bulldozing their way through you can keep it simple by just having them step or hop over a series of low bars or they can practice army crawling underneath while you and/or older siblings step through a more complex maze!
Painter’s Tape Follow-the-Trail
Also using painter’s tape, you can make a trail through your house for your child to follow. It’s easy to get creative with this one to burn off as much energy as possible! They can use it as a “balance beam” to practice walking with one foot directly in front of the other, complete it while hopping on one foot, crab walking, walking backwards, bear crawling, the possibilities are endless! For an extra challenge you can add obstacles to hop over or go around, or you can place objects at the end for them to carry back to the starting point using the same method they used to get there.
Painter’s Tape Hopscotch
Yet another way to use up some painter’s tape - indoor hopscotch! You can find a wonderful example here. The kids love this game and there’s many ways to play it to make it more or less complex. For a more classic take, your child can toss a stuffie into one of the squares and hop over it while going down and back. Of course, they can also hop both feet or one foot in each square, or go backwards or sideways. Pro tip: instead of creating the numbers out of tape in each square just write the numbers on a doubled up piece of tape with a pen.
Cardboard Box Build-and-Smash
If you’ve been doing some of your holiday shopping online chances are you have some cardboard boxes lying around while you wait for the next recycling pick up. A great use for them is to empty them, tape them closed, and let your child use them as giant building blocks! It’s a great way to use their imagination, explore scale, and challenge themselves to figure out how to build with boxes of different shapes and sizes. Since the boxes will likely be much larger than their usual building materials, they won’t be spending this time sitting but having to stand, bend, reach, and stretch as they stack the boxes up. The best part is they can also knock them down as many times as they want without worrying about breaking them since you were planning on getting rid of them anyway. When it comes time for recycling to be picked up, your child may also enjoy jumping on the boxes to help flatten them down.
