10 Healthy Ways to Keep Your Kids Entertained

It’s tricky to manage your home office and kids at the same time. While your work may have a list of tasks to fulfill, parenthood has its own list. You can certainly pause your work for a while and look after the kids, but a healthy work-life balance can also be achieved by keeping the kids busy in healthy ways. 5-Minute Crafts came up with the most productive activities that will keep your little ones entertained for a long time.

1. Let them sort stuff.

Offer your kids pom-poms and ask them to divide these things into a muffin pan according to shape, size, or color. Children love sorting, organizing, and putting things in place and in piles. And when you make them work with these items, it keeps them in a flow state.

2. Open an imaginary store.

Here, you may need a toy cash register. Children are super creative when it comes to making a store, it can be a pretend pizza parlor or even a make-believe mall.

3. Make the most of a cardboard box.

With cardboard boxes, there’s endless creativity that can keep your kids busy. Just gather some markers and tape, and transform it into a truck, a castle, a spaceship, or even a time machine. There are many ideas available in books and on the internet for this idea.

4. Build a huge race track

Put some painter’s tape around to create a road system that spreads around a few rooms, runs up the walls, and stretches even under and over your furniture. You can also level up this creation by putting up decorated shoeboxes as buildings along the way.

5. Create a camping scene.

Build a tent or a fort, and then add many things like pillows and blankets to it, making the tent comfortable for your kids. Also, you can feed them healthy snacks, turn the lights off, and use a flashlight to make shadow animals. You can even add some stuffed toys to the mix, give them binoculars to look out for bears, and keep some animal picture books around to go along with the theme.

6. Indulge them in a sensory tub.

If you have a sand table for this one, then great! If you don’t, then have a bin or a tub ready and fill it up with fresh sand. If you don’t have sand, use rice instead. Then, add spoons for digging and funnels for pouring. Next add many things like trucks, plastic animals, measuring bowls, spoons, etc., in the rice or sand. This will keep your kid busy.

7. Play balloon volleyball.

Begin by tying a string, a ribbon, or a piece of yarn tightly between 2 chairs and you have your indoor net ready. You can use a beach ball or a balloon here to start the volleyball match.

8. Play noodle balloon.

Here, gather some pool noodles, balloons, and a box. The object of the game is to bat the balloon with the pool noodle into the box. This game guarantees a lot of laughter.

9. Make a mural.

Pick a wall that your kids can easily reach and then cover it with paper. The best option is to use paper that is in a roll. Then gather some crayons and colors, and have them let their inner artist blossom. This will also keep them busy for a very long time.

10. Create a game box.

Take a box and fill it with things that your kid can play and spend time with alone like playing cards, coloring books, puzzles, and more. Whenever you need to keep your kids busy and entertained, you can give them this box. The more they use the box, the more habitual they’ll become with it as a part of their routine.

Bonus: Limit your kid’s screen time if they use a phone/tablet.

Many parents prefer to hand over smartphones and tablets to their kids to keep them busy, not taking note of the adverse effects, like behavioral issues, that it may cause in the future, like irritability, aggressiveness, distance and differences in family, lack of social skills, and a lot more. You can fix this addiction by reducing their screen time instead. You also need to understand that this issue won’t be solved overnight — it may require a lot of patience on your part.

You may also want to distract them and try to keep them busy by going with the tips suggested above. And you can also try to keep your meal times device-free zones and go for a run in the park or play treasure hunt. Apart from reducing screen time, it will also contribute to their well-being.