32 Ways to Keep the Kids Occupied

3. Wax Creations:
Give the kids their old, wax crayon stubs and let them make shavings from them with a butter knife onto a piece of wax paper. When they're done, carefully take their creations to the ironing board, lay another piece of wax paper on top, and briefly press with a warm iron.

Let the kids watch as the colours melt together. Put them on the table to cool down and harden.

4. Old Clothes:

Sort through all of your old clothes. There's bound to be something that doesn't fit, or isn't in fashion and that you're too embarrassed to take to a charity shop. If you haven't got anything at all ask your friends and family.

 Get 2 cardboard boxes, one for "dress up" clothes, and one for rags. Fill the "dress up" box with the most outrages clothes, and cut up the other clothes for the "rags" box. Let the kids play "dress up", or let them create things with the rags.

 Hours and hours of fun!

5. Puppet Show:

Let the kids make finger puppets from paper, help them to create a "show" with a script and characters. Build up a few boxes stuck together with packing tape, make the top one have an opening at the front and hang up a curtain (you can use rags from the rag-box for this).

Let the kids practice until they feel really confident then invite a few friends or family members over to watch the "show".

 6. Kitchen Fun:

Find some cookery books, let the kids choose a simple recipe and work together on making dinner, desserts, snacks or cakes. The older ones can do the main cooking, and the younger ones can do the measuring or decorating.

32 Ways to Keep the Kids Occupied

My grandson will be visiting us soon, and I began to think about how you can keep kids occupied when they start to get a little bit bored. Throughout the years, we’ve come up with lots of things we can do together as a family that don’t cost the earth. A lot of them are even free, so over the next few days I am going to focus my posts on these ideas.

Some things we’ve thought up ourselves, other things are ideas passed down through generations and yet other things are what we have been lucky enough to learn about from various books, people and situations.

At first I thought it would be hard work coming up with so many ideas for you to use and adapt to suit your own needs, but once I got started it actually turned out to be quite easy.

I’m sure both you and your child/children (or even your grandchildren) will find lots of great things to do together.   

Great Ideas for Indoor Activities

1. Story time:

Read and discuss a book or a chapter of a book, make up your own endings. You can even make up your own stories by sitting the kids in a ring and letting them "add a sentence". We've made up lots of really funny stories this way.

 2. Giant Easel:
Go to a charity shop or wallpaper shop and buy leftover rolls of wallpaper. Cover a wall with the paper, back to front; stick it up with blu-tac or drawing pins.

Give the kids paints, crayons, chalks pens etc and let them create their own frieze. The little ones reach the bottom, whilst the big ones can reach up to the top.