5 boredom-busting stay at home activities you can do right now

Materials: Baking soda, white or cleaning vinegar, food dye (optional), jugs / bottles, measuring cups, scoops and spoons

There is a reason why this is a perennial messy play favourite among children and Educators alike! 

Baking soda and vinegar are very likely already in your kitchen cupboard (if not the laundry) and cheap enough that children can explore again and again. Combine the two with food dye to create an eye-popping chemical reaction that can prompt a conversation about science concepts in children of all ages.

For toddlers this can be an opportunity to work on fine motor skills, such as tipping, scooping, grasping and pouring. Measuring is a great introduction to everyday maths, so even basic questions like “Will that fit in there?” or “Is it empty or full?” enable toddlers to access their higher level thinking skills in relation to concepts such as volume and opposites e.g., full and empty or tall and short .

A Preschool aged child utilises their sense of smell to understand that vinegar is different to water, even though they look the same. Provide both liquids and allow children to investigate cause and effect by combining them with the baking soda.

Questions such as “why does vinegar make the baking soda fizz?” “Will the water make it explode, too?” encourages a child to hypothesise, making predictions based on their current knowledge or past experience.

For school-age children this experience is a great opportunity to start explaining chemistry. The baking soda and vinegar are chemicals, together they create a chemical reaction – something changes when they touch each other. Try and think of other chemical reactions that happen around the house. 

Materials: Ribbons, fabric strips, or strips of plastic bags, curtain ring, top of a mason jar, used sticky tape reel

Waldorf-inspired hand kites captivate children of all ages. The fluttering ribbons entice children who are sensory-driven, and for older children you can incorporate weather and science concepts to start exploring blustery spring winds.

Crank up the music and start a dance party using the hand kites to accentuate your grooves, or just see where imagination takes you. At Sustainable Play Preschool these kites have been jellyfish, eagle’s wings, unicorn horns and puppy dog tails.

If you don’t have ribbons in the house, exercise those recycling muscles and use any lightweight fabric, like a bedsheet that’s already seen its best days. Why not repurpose a plastic bag, they come in lots of different colours and textures and can be cut into strips. 

Materials: Food dye, empty jars or jugs, ice cube trays, white bowls, plates, paper, paper towel, or cloth

Colour. Water. Mess. Fun. What’s not for a stuck-at-home Preschooler to love? This is a good one to do outside on the grass, in clothes that have seen better days. 

Preparation is key to get the best out of your mixing experience so try and get all your jars, ice cube trays, and paper ready before the food dye comes out.

You can do this in two stages, or prep the freezing part in advance if your children are very young or have a short attention span.

Stage one: Fill three transparent jars or jugs with primary colours red, blue and yellow. Pour the primary colours into ice cube trays, being careful not to mix them (that will come later!). Children love to pour things themselves, plus it’s an important life skill which allows children to practise hand and eye coordination and further develop their fine motor strength and control. 

Freeze trays until solid.

Stage two: The fun part! Crack your colourful cubes out of the trays and start mixing. The bright white of ceramic bowls and plates is the perfect surface to examine the combinations of vibrant colour. Experiment with rubbing the slippery ice over paper or cloth to create abstract artworks for the fridge.

Introduce sensory awareness by asking open-ended questions like “How does that ice cube feel on your fingers?” or STEM concepts with encouraging questions such as “what will happen when we leave these in the sun?”. Open-ended questions inspire a child to access their critical thinking skills, and their answers may surprise you.

For those children who like to keep their hands clean, try adding small sticks to the ice cube trays before freezing. This makes for the perfect handle, with the addition of paper, the experience is expended and the children are able to create beautiful masterpieces to share with family and friends. A child’s art can also make a perfect greeting card.

Materials: Flour, cream of tartar, salt, oil, water

There is a reason why every Early Childhood Educator knows how to make playdough! Playdough provides the perfect combo of tactile experience and creative freedom. 

Younger children love the way it squishes and squashes, and older children’s imaginations run wild creating tiny worlds or ‘cooking’ up a storm.

Preschool age children are still developing the muscles in their hands, so letting the little ones smash playdough all afternoon helps to build the dexterity that they’ll need when they start grasping pencils and writing.

Materials: Wide masking tape

Playing outdoors doesn’t have to be all high-octane rough and tumble – children and adults alike need time in nature for deep rest. This experience is designed to activate a child’s senses on a mindful walk around the garden. 

Wrap a band of tape sticky-side up around your wrist. Use your eyes, ears, fingers and nose to discover natural treasures and textures and stick them to your bracelet. Right now in Spring, the outdoors is bursting with colourful native blossoms and bright new shoots. Take the opportunity to move slowly around your garden and take note of which colours, shapes and sounds are new. 

Materials: Bricks or commercial fire pit, sacrificial grass, bark, sticks, paper, logs, matches, flint or lighter, bucket of water

Yep, when you’ve exhausted all the other lockdown activities, it’s time to bring out the big guns. All you need is a patch of lawn you’re willing to sacrifice (the heat will damage the grass), something to light it with, some sticks and wood for fuel, bricks to ring around the fuel to keep it contained, and a big bucket of water to drench any escaping embers. 

Fires are totally doable with young children, as the big people in charge, we have the responsibility to make sure everyone stays safe – including the neighbours. Check the RFS website for the fire danger rating for the day.

If you’re not sure how your children will act around fire, start small by introducing candles at the kitchen table, and using this as a time to talk about fire safety and establish ground rules. Using a flint firestarter instead of a lighter or matches means that children don’t associate those readily available household objects with “play”,  they might even be better at it than Mum and Dad!

Risky play has huge benefits for children of all ages in developing their confidence, autonomy, executive function, and emotional self-regulation. Building a fire is an opportunity to have a meaningful talk with children about how to keep their bodies safe.

Establish clear ground rules about how to behave around fire, and what to do if it gets out of control. The process of talking about risk and collaborating with children to create rules and boundaries empowers them to start taking responsibility for their own health and safety, and builds the foundation for important life skills that they’ll use for the rest of their lives.

Here is a great lighting controlled fires with kids guide to help keep everyone safe. 

Written By

Anneliese began her career in graphic design, both studying and working during University. Post-graduation, she transitioned her cheery passion towards the field of sustainability, working in bush regeneration, organic farming, vegan cafe hospitality and regenerative agriculture.

Anneliese is fascinated with learning ways to grow, preserve, share and celebrate food in sustainable ways. She believes the many dimensions of food provide a perfect approach for engaging young learners in the concepts of respect, ecology and care for the Earth.