Bored yet? If you’ve been stuck inside for a month with school cancelled, your kids probably are!
Balancing work and home-schooling for parents who are still employed at the moment is a difficult task. Harder still is to burn off all that youthful energy, being indoors for so much of the time and with not a lot in the way of public recreational activities available.
One way that I’ve found to help the situation is enticing your kids to get outside every day if the weather allows for it and getting them engaged in some sort of learning or family activity. Kill two birds with one stone and try to incorporate some of your required digital learning with outdoor activities. With younger children, this can be easy, as they don’t necessarily have to sit at a desk writing a paper, but much of their suggested “homework” can be modified to make it more engaging for them.
Sidewalk Chalk
Ahhh, sidewalk chalk… my saviour some days! This colourful mess has been a staple for us in keeping the kids entertained AND keeping them outdoors. It’s also amazing how much their own imaginations will take over and keep them busy with minimal supervision – helpful for parents who need a break! One of the best parts about sidewalk chalk fun is that it’s pretty darn cheap and you can find large sidewalk chalk packs online or with other cheap goodies at most dollar stores or other discount retailers locally.
Try converting some of your children’s favourite indoor games and activities to outdoor sidewalk chalk adventures – here are some fun ideas for games and learning.
Snakes & Ladders
This is a fun game for all ages and the best part is you can design the board however you like after drawing out your custom-sized grid. Make the game as small or as big as you like. Children learning their numbers can practice counting skills as well as addition and subtraction. Ask them what number or space they are on? When you roll a “5” for example…. add the number to the space they’re on… “which space will you go to?” If you land on a snake and go from 23 down to 7… subtract. Ask them, “How many spaces have you fallen back?” Following the basic rules of the game, you can incorporate lots of basic math concepts.
FUN TIP – if you have enough sidewalk chalk on hand, you can draw a giant board for this one and “you” become the pieces moving around the game. Kids love jumping from square to square and pretending to climb ladders and slide down snakes.
Target Games
This one is easy and fun for all ages. You’re basically drawing a big bullseye with as many rings as you like. Have your kids help you draw it out and label it along the way, ask them to choose some random numbers between something they can add, say 1 and 20. You’ll be using a bean bag or some other sort of object that will land relatively softly and stay on the board – or a pine cone since we couldn’t find one…
Now turn a classic target game into a bit of a math game. Have each player take two tosses per turn. After throwing, have each player add their two tosses up in their head, you must get the correct answer to earn the points. Keep a scoring ledger off to the side, and after every two rounds, you can practice adding up the points (two-digit and three-digit numbers).
Mazes
Mazes offer some fun, but also give kids the chance to design something on their own and be creative. How do they want to design the maze, what sort of tricks and traps might there be inside, or ways to avoid them. Once the maze is drawn out and completed, your kids can see how long it takes them to work their way through to the end. They can use the sidewalk chalk to trace their path out in different colours or have them grab something like a toy car to drive their way through it.
Hopscotch Variations
Hopscotch is a classic schoolyard game, it will keep your kids physically active, forcing them to jump, balance and work on co-ordination. At the same time, you can change it up and do things like swap out numbers for things like sight words. Call the words out to your kids as they complete the course to instruct them which words to jump to.
Tic, Tic Toe
X’s and O’s or Tic Tac Toe – another simplistic game that can teach younger ones a little bit of critical thinking and logic. Start the game and then have them evaluate their choice of positioning and reasoning after a couple of turns. Where did you place your X & O and why? Is it better to go first or last? Is it even possible to win against a good opponent? Once you’ve completed some games, use the boards to see if they can recognize patterns within them.
Twister
Everyone should know this game. It’s almost a good substitute for physical education class with all the stretching, balancing, awkward positions and potentially even some teamwork mixed in a two-player game.
For younger kids it’s also a good way, believe it or not, to teach them basic concepts like recognizing right vs. left arm and leg, colours for the really young ones who might not have the balance yet. It’s good for young primary kids, kindergartners and preschoolers to figure out how to manipulate their bodies using their gross motor skills.
Imagination
Let’s just call this one art class. If you leave your kids to their own devices, they’ll likely surprise you and keep themselves entertained. Or at least you hope they will.
Our kids have a favourite exercise of drawing “levels” which by itself can take up a good amount of time. There’s lots of creativity and imagination involved, they seem to love labelling things with numbers and assigning values according to difficulty. Once the construction is finished, they enjoy partaking in challenging each other to complete the levels. The photo here is a bridge (of course) with water flowing across various sections. Your goal is to tip-toe your way across the bridge without touching the water or falling off the sides.
The point is, let your kids be creative with their sidewalk chalk, make up their own games with a little encouragement along the way. If you’re so lucky that they stay busy with this for a while, grab a lawn chair a drink and call it your own ‘recess’.
That’s a good idea! I recently got some sidewalk chalk from Dollarama, but it was a rainbow kind.
Dollarama actually has some really good deals on chalk. Last time I got a huge box there for like $4. I’ve been avoiding Dollarama during COVID though, too crowded/tight in those stores.