!44: Ideas for Play With Your Children - Craft Box

!±8± Ideas for Play With Your Children - Craft Box

Most psychologists agree that play is essential to a child's emotional development but nowadays most families have both parents working, which makes it difficult to find quality time to spend with your child. Gone are the days when families could afford to have one parent at home looking after the children, and while most mothers and fathers would love to spend more time with their kids it can be hard to fit everything in. After a long day at work it can be really difficult to even use your imagination and come up with fun activities to do with your children, and it is often easier to sit in front of the television.

However, there are lots of simple games you can play that won't take a lot of energy but will mean the world to your children. If you ask any child who they would like to spend more time with they will invariably name the parent they see the least. So why not find 20 minutes or so out of your day to bond with your children and give them some much needed attention and affection.

So what can you do that for 20 minutes or more when you come home from work? Children don't need a lot to have fun, simply sharing stories about what you have both done with your day is fun for them. Similarly, they can have every toy in the world but can find the most fascinating thing is something you would normally throw away or find no value in, such as an empty drinks bottle or a cardboard box. Why not find an empty box and start to make a collection of bits and pieces to use when you spend time with your children.

With winter approaching spending time indoors will become a much more appealing idea to parents, but keeping children entertained indoors can prove difficult. One thing that may help is to start a craft box. Find a big biscuit tin or other big container and start filling it with bits and pieces that you could use to create little masterpieces. Some examples include ribbon, string, pieces of coloured paper or card, glitter, cardboard toilet rolls, tracing paper, stickers, glue, kids scissors, felt pieces, fabric swatches, coloured wool, paper, empty yoghurt cartons, paints, colouring pencils, chalk, pens, markers...the list goes on. Your craft box can include anything you like and you can tell the grandparents and aunts and uncles to save anything they think could be fun to play with - a gran might be a fab source of wool remnants while an uncle might have some old clothes that can be cut up and used as fabric swatches.

The idea is not to collect a lot of old junk and store it away never to be used, but to save up pieces that, when used together, can create fun projects for your kids. The next day you find yourself trapped inside by the weather you can dig out your craft box, clear the table, put down a plastic sheet to minimise any mess and either put the whole craft box on the table or put a selection of pieces out for your children to play with.

One day they could create a beautiful painting, the next they could do some papier mache with old newspaper, and the next day they could build a robot using the cardboard toilet rolls and some coloured card. The options are limitless and the fun that can be had by creating new things and exploring different ways to use everyday pieces is priceless for the development of your child's imagination.

Albert Einstein once said "Imagination is more important than knowledge" and if you provide your children with the tools to develop their imagination, and share that experience with them, you are giving your child something invaluable.

And just remember..."You will never be a bore if you help them explore!"