There are lots of things that come under the heading of arts and crafts that are both entertaining, and fun for kids to do. Not only that, many of them are not just fun but educational also.
Learning to draw and paint should be on the curriculum of every child, but this can be extended into modeling, pottery, and making other practical objects which are not just for amusement, but can also serve a useful purpose around the home or the school.
It is never too early to start to tech your kids computer skills. Today’s younger parents were brought up with computers in school, although older parents (40+) have had to learn by trial and error.
The future is high tech, and is going to get even more so. Children of today, therefore, are going to have to handle computers in the same way that older parents had to learn to ride a bike. That was about as high-tech as it got in the 1970’s, but things have come on apace.
You can start to work on computer skills for your kids as soon as they are old enough to be able to press a button. However, at that age you have to sit alongside them; you can’t give them a project and tell them to get on with it.
There are dozens of things that your kids can do in the backyard which will keep them occupied for hours, learning crafts, and giving them some exercise at the same time in many cases.
One of the most obvious things to do in the backyard is gardening. If you are keen on gardening yourself, you probably have an ornamental yard, and you may also grow your own fruit and vegetables, depending on how much space you have. There is nothing nicer than picking fresh vegetables from the garden, rinsing them under the tap and putting them straight into the cooking pot. It is far healthier than the mass-produced stuff you buy from Walmart, grown as it is with a multitude of chemicals poured into the soil.
It is also lovely to sit in the yard enjoying a barbecue, and being surrounded by beautiful flowers, shrubs and trees.
There are literally hundreds and hundreds of science projects that you can get your kids involved in. To begin with, the word “science” covers a wide range of subjects. There are chemistry projects, physics projects, and biology projects, as well as earth and space projects, projects involving microscopes, and much more.
For young children you can do no better than start in your own backyard or your local park. Consider all of the animals and birds that live there, and then begin to look for their homes. Birds live in nests, so you may want to teach your kids to look up in tree branches or in hedgerows and see if there are any bird’s nests there. What about spiders? Are there any spider’s webs?
Many of us as kids used to dread math – we simply couldn’t get our head around all that logarithms and x + y – z / 200 = pi, or some such apparent nonsense. What do pies have to do with math, anyway?
A lot of our thinking about math was because our parents and teachers failed to make it any fun. Math can indeed be a lot of fun, if it is taught in the right way, from the ground up.
As parents, there are a lot of things that we can do to help our children absorb knowledge and want to learn more by making it fun and entertaining, as well as educational. There are dozens of math projects for kids that you can find if you do a simple search online. Here are a few of the best that we have found.
Many parents are happy to let their kids go off and play all day while they get on with all of the chores and other things that make up our busy lives these days: work, shopping, laundry, cleaning the house, gardening, taking the car for a service, popping down to the dry cleaners, and much, much more. We have so much to occupy our time that it seems there simply aren’t enough hours in the day – let alone days in the week.
However, as parents we should not lose sight of the fact that our little ones need stimulus and education if they are to grow up as respectable and worthy members of society, and it is no use leaving that entirely to the educational professionals. Other considerations aside, we may not entirely agree with the curriculum set down at their schools, and wish to add other elements to their lives in order to give them as broad an education as possible.