Keeping Children Entertained During Lockdown

A homemade gym

One member of our team has two teenagers and a 20-year-old, who’s a university student, stuck at home. They all love the gym so they decided to create an outdoor covered exercise area. This comprises of gym mat flooring, kettle bell weight bags, which they filled with sand, a plyometric box, a Wi-Fi projector and a white blind for a screen – which they project online classes onto making it like a mini gym studio!

They already had a roofed seating area so they covered the sides and bought some cheap infrared heaters to help during these chilly winter months.

They’ve even gone as far as creating a booking system on the kitchen blackboard so they can all book gym space in advance making it much easier for each person to create their own routines.

Paid Jobs

You can keep teenagers busy by offering them a form of work, especially as jobs are hard to come by at the moment. One of our team asked their teenagers to do jobs like painting the shed and the outside of the house in return for some money. There’s never been a better time to make those small home improvements and your teenagers will appreciate the income whilst learning some valuable life skills.

Buying and Selling

As most families are looking for new things to do and new forms of entertainment it’s a good time to look at things you could sell and then use the money to fund new purchases of your own. Teenagers again can get involved with this.

One of our team’s teenage boys have sold all their old DVDs on eBay as they needed to go. They ended up doing well out of it and from the proceeds added to their stock with a new batch! Another good idea is to fix up and sell old bikes or anything like that that’s sitting around in the garage unused.

Giving Back

The same boys are also keeping busy by getting involved in an initiative that helps those less fortunate. They’re teaching Kenyan primary school children for an hour once a week via Skype. It’s simple for older children to do and the Kenyan children enjoy it whilst getting access to a new form of education.

Hopefully the above has given you some new ideas to keep your older ones entertained. Now let’s move on to our ideas for keeping young children entertained during lockdown.

Treasure Hunts

If you’re used to doing Easter egg hunts with your kids, or even if you’re new to homemade hunts, now is a great time to get creative and plan a new kind of treasure hunt to keep the little ones on their toes.

Create a theme, the clues and the prizes then set out your hunt and enjoy the fun.

Home challenges

We’re all stuck at home so why not use your surroundings to create fun challenges around?

One idea we have is hiding post-it notes around the house with numbers on them. The children then have to find them and match them to the numbers on their boards. You could also use the fridge or anything like that in your home.

When you go for your family walks why not carry on the challenges? Task your kids with spotting certain things on your outing – a red car, a dog, or a cat for example.

Home/Outdoor Games

Going hand in hand with home challenges are different types of games. Across the I-4business team we have a few activities that we do with our families, including playing hide and seek in the house, playing cards, board games, and even tombola to keep the children entertained.

Those with gardens and local outside space suggest making dens with the family and enjoying the refreshment of the great outdoors. Even in winter there’s a lot you can do with a bit of creativity.

Cooking

With us all at home and household duties on the increase, getting the children involved in the cooking is a great idea to get them focused on something new, educate them with some valuable life skills, and it gives some much needed help to busy parents!

You can put a twist on this too if you have older children and add a bit of spice by creating some competition. Some of our team hold ‘come dine with me’ type nights at home. Each family member takes their turn cooking dinner and the rest of the family scores their performance. You can even create a prize for the winner if you want to.

Another popular idea is signing up to a service like HelloFresh which comes with all the ingredients measured out and easy to follow recipes making it easy for you to involve the children with the preparation of your evening meal. Plus, it’s an easy way to create a varied, interesting and balanced diet whilst trying something new during lockdown.

Managing your work/life/family balance

The key theme here is variety. Which is already no doubt a feature of trying to balance your work and your newfound full-on family life. And whilst you’ve no doubt got variety forced upon you in many areas which can seem overwhelming, creating your own variety of new activities can help to relieve some of that stress. Hopefully these ideas will help you do that.

New Benefits of Data

The fact that we’re writing an article like this shows you how much all businesses are having to adapt. More people working from home naturally means that you need to change your marketing to reach the people and companies that you need to.

That’s where data comes in. It’s now much harder to reach people by phone and people are also moving jobs, losing their jobs, or on furlough. You need up to date information on your target audience, and that’s what we can help with.

Email marketing is on the rise as more people are working remotely so acquiring some new, up to date, compliant data to launch an email campaign around is currently a winning strategy.

We might be at home trying to come up with new, innovative ways to keep the children entertained but we’re still working as normal and here if you need us. Contact us to find out more about our date services or sign up for your free account here.