Best recreational activities for children – helping reduce screen-time
Looking for something because of which your children will voluntarily reduce screen-time? The following activities will improve your child’s cognition skills as well.
Here are some recreational indoor activities your children and you can engage in:
Indoor:
Act out stories or skits: Hand out a variety of costume pieces and have children dress up. Helps them understand characters, improves social skills and language, teaches figures of speech and more.
Get crafty: Provide coloring sheets or make greeting cards for upcoming holidays or birthdays. They develop many skills such as concentration, fine motor and coordination for early writing skills and correct finger grip.
Enlist their help: Involve children in part of meal and snack preparation, as well as clean-up. Helps them develop their sense of responsibility for themselves and the family. Moving around and doing tasks at home can also enhance your children's motor skills, both gross and fine motor skills.
Play music: Have your child sing along and make up their own dances. Through singing, they will improve the vocabulary and communication skills. Rhyming in songs provides exercise for the brain and develops valuable memory skills.
Puzzle time: Have easy puzzles available that children can do alone or in pairs. Helps develop basic skills such as shape recognition, concentration, goal setting, patience and a sense of achievement.
Outdoor or Indoor:
Hopscotch: Your child will learn to control body rhythm, build balance, as well as hand/eye coordination. Hopping signals advances in physical coordination, balance, and cognitive development. The rules of hopscotch encourage spatial awareness.
Bubble blowing - Make your own bubbles solution and blow some bubbles: The physical act of blowing can be an amazingly effective sensory-based way to help your child “organize”, calm and focus on the body.
Shadow drawing: Keep some of your child’s favourite toys in the balcony when the sun is out and draw their shadows. Drawing with light and shadow helps them recognize and understand several important concepts in physics. Is the shadow smaller than the toy or bigger?
Gardening – Give your child the responsibility to water the plants every day, over time teach repotting and maintenance. Gardening also helps with all the senses, like textures of leaves and stems, smell & beautiful sight of flowers, taste from a simple kitchen garden with mint or coriander.
Art on the floor – give your child some chalk and rangoli powder. Helps in motor skills and problem solving.
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