15 Ways To Keep Your Child Busy

There are options for children of all ages. Some ways will help distract the child and win a few free hours, while others will be suitable for joint leisure and bring a lot of fun not only to children but also to parents.

1 Have a sumo wrestling match

Put a big T-shirt on your child and stuff soft pillows under it. This way children can have a sumo wrestling match – bumping into each other from a run and challenging each other without the risk of hurting themselves. The wider the girth of the fighters, the safer the fight will be.

2 Try checkers with sweets

Use a ready-made game board or make one yourself. To do this, glue strips of colored sticky tape on a square base to make a field.

Instead of checkers, use two-colored cookies, meringue or marshmallows. Any other sweets that fit in the playing field and do not stain your hands and clothes will do.

During the game the opponent’s checkers will be eaten literally and figuratively.

3 Have a stain-free painting session

Take a ziploc sealed bag the size of an A4 sheet. Mix a small amount of shower gel with the dye. Pour the mixture into the bag, seal it, and tape it to the table. Invite your child to draw on the improvised canvas with their fingers – the dyed gel will move around inside, creating abstract patterns.

4 Try coloring sandwiches

For this home entertainment, you need toasted bread, milk, and food coloring.

Pour a small amount of milk into individual containers and color in different colors. Give your child a clean brush and offer to turn the bread into a work of art.

When the picture is ready, briefly send the slices to the toaster, bake the picture and enjoy the beautiful food.

5 Set up speed games

Almost any item in the house can be turned into a game tool to do something at speed for one minute. Here are some ideas:

• Collect candy or marmalade with chopsticks.
• Build the tallest tower you can out of coins or plastic cups.
• Throw as many socks in the laundry basket as possible.
• Don’t let the balloon fall to the floor.

6 Color the rice

You will need rice, white vinegar, food coloring and clean, thick plastic bags.

Dilute the pigments in a small amount of vinegar. Put a handful of rice in a bag, pour the dye into it, tie the plastic tightly and stir the grits to coat them well.

Children will love the process, when they can twist and squeeze the bag, and the result. Dyed rice should dry, and then it can be used for pictures, appliques and all kinds of crafts.

7 Make a car wash with your own hands

A toy car wash can be made from a 5-liter plastic canister, dishwashing sponges, and waterproof tape.

From the canister, cut out the body of the car wash with the entrance and exit. Cut the dishwashing sponges into thin, long sticks and stick them vertically to the ceiling of the sink.

Use permanent markers to paint the design. Place shaving foam in the empty yogurt jars. Use old toothbrushes and toy cars. And then just use your imagination.

8 Make a slime

It takes no more than 10 minutes to prepare the mixture. You will need 100 ml of PVA glue, dye and 1-2 teaspoons of boric acid sodium. The latter is also known as “borax” (you can buy it at the drugstore).

Pour the glue into a bowl, add a few drops of dye and stir. Then drop in some borax and keep stirring. As it thickens, add more boric acid, a few drops at a time.

When the mass starts to stick from the sides of the bowl and stretch, knead it with your hands, like a dough. After a few minutes, the slime will become malleable and will not stick to the surfaces.

Just don’t play with the mass on a bedspread with lint: it gets clogged in it and doesn’t come off well. And if you use food pigment, the slime may not stain your hands very much.

9 Build a dollhouse out of boxes

You will need some time for this task, but then children will play with such a house by themselves, and not one day.

To make the construction, prepare shoe boxes, tape, scrapbooking paper or wallpaper, paints, office glue, and newspapers.

Insert the shoe boxes into each other at a 90° angle. Two pieces will make one corner of the house and one floor. Staple the boxes together with duct tape.

Then glue the construction with newspaper. To hide the joints of the boxes and make them look more like a house, you can use papier-mache – a pre-made mixture of soaked paper and PVA glue. But if you want to make everything faster, skip this step.

For decorating the walls, ceiling and floor, you can use acrylic paints or gouache, pieces of wallpaper, fabric and even linoleum, beautiful paper. Arrange the furniture, and the doll’s mansion is ready.

Also, you can make a small house from one box with partitions – place them crosswise – and you have two floors and four rooms.

10 Arrange moving games with the paper tape

Use painter’s tape to mark the floor. Try the following games:

• Classics. You can use a plastic cup or candy can as a bat.
• Floor Shooting Range. Make a target of several circles on the floor and take turns launching a plastic ball. The one who rolls the shell closer to the center wins.
• Tic-tac-toe. Glue four strips of paper tape, and the figures draw on cups or plastic balls and put them on the field.
• Long jumps. Mark the start line and have a competition. Mark the results of each jump with a strip of tape.
• “Rope Walkers. Glue duct tape in long strips and shapes and then ask the children to walk along this “rope” without stepping sideways once.

11 Put on a bubble show

Make a solution for the bubbles: mix 3.5 liters of water, a glass of dishwashing liquid, and a tablespoon of glycerin. For blowing, you can use a commercially available device or make more interesting variants from improvised means.

For example, if you staple a few big tubes together, you can blow out whole rainbow bunches.

You can also make a fixture for giant bubbles. Run a long string through two tubes and tie the ends with a knot.

After that, you will be left with wooden skewers to hold on to, and you can test it.

12 Make a shark or crocodile out of a clothespin

Draw a shark or crocodile with big teeth on paper, cut the picture in half and glue the two pieces to a clothespin. Children can have battles of toothy predators opening their mouths.

13 Show the kids how to make their own stickers

Give the children a sheet of self-adhesive paper and have them draw small pictures. When they are ready, cut out the pictures and use them as stickers.

14 Show children how to weave bracelets out of colored cords

If the child already knows how to braid and knit interesting knots, buy several meters of colored cords. You can make a lot of simple bracelets with them.

15 Make a frozen dinosaur egg

If your child likes dinosaurs, show him how the ancient lizards hatched from eggs. Put the figurine in a balloon and fill it with water, then put the balloon in the freezer. When the water freezes, call the young paleontologists.

Remove the rubber “shell” from the eggs, examine the dinosaur in the ice thickness. Take out the toy with a small hammer.