Play Activities to Try During Lockdowns

With half of Australia now in some form of lockdown, the days can be long at home, especially if children are home too. Keeping them entertained for longer than a minute can be difficult, so Nesk Kids wanted to share some play activities that could hopefully help in your home.

1. Build Snow People

Grab some playdough, buttons, googly eyes, sticks and some grapat orange cones and create some snow people ⛄️❄️ 

2. Create Loose Parts Patterns

Use some coloured tape, your loose parts and create a line design, shape design, letter design, or picture design. Get the kids to line up your grapat mandala pieces or coloured loose parts along the lines.

3. Do some gardening

This helps children understand more about where food comes from and how to care for vegetables / herbs / flowers and our environment 👨🏽‍🌾 Grab a little beginners gardening kit if that helps.

4. Paint Rocks 

Grab some paint and rocks and get your creativity going. Paint words of kindness, your favourite animal, a symbol or even a picture. Then once finished, you can place the rocks around the house and play hide and seek to find them, or simply place the painted rocks in the garden.

5. Do some Colour Sorting

You can use some magnetic tiles - create colour coded cubes and grab some loose parts (image above displays Grapat Lola being used). Have your child colour sort the loose parts into the coloured cubes. If you do not have magnetic tiles, you can simply use small cardboard boxes (paint or colour them accordingly).

6. Letter Formation Practice

With many children now remote learning for school, practicing letter formation is an important part of the cirriculum. Along with maths activites. Here we have an activity practicing the letter "L" and associating it to a word "Leaves", then we have picked some leaves and have numbered them. A great activity that emcompasses language, maths and getting outside to collect some leaves!  

7. Create Cardboard Monsters

Draw out some monsters on some cardboard and decorate them using some googly eyes, paper squares, and various craft items. Create scary monsters, or friendly ones, funny looking ones, silly ones. Have fun!

8. Create an Arctic Play Activity

Using some wooden blocks/boulders, penguins, ice cubes, waterbeads, nature rocks and some ice packs! Small world play is creating a life scene for a child to play with. 

Hi, I am Niki, the proud founder and owner of Nesk Kids!

When creating Nesk Kids, I really wanted to focus on bringing loose parts play into children’s lives. With so much screen time these days, it felt like children were losing the opportunity to be creative and imaginative (especially in the physical world). With my love for open-ended play, I was on a mission to create a unique product and platform where loose parts, education and creativity were at the forefront. Play and sensory learning are so important in a child’s development, and the opportunities are endless in a child's imagination - so why not nurture it and let them explore it (that is what Nesk Kids is all about). 

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