Activities for Kids at Home: Crafts, Exercise Ideas & Other Ways to Keep them Busy While You Work

With little warning, many of us (myself included!) are now juggling working from home and keeping our kids busy with activities at home. This is no small feat, and we should all take a moment to honor all of the stay-at-home parents out there!

To make our new reality a bit easier, we compiled a list of fun activities for kids at home, including crafts, exercise ideas, and learning resources.

Schedules Are Key

The first thing I learned while trying to parent while working from home? Schedules are a must. (So are Zoom calls with friends to stay sane but that’s a blog for another day.) When you write down a schedule, it takes it out of your brain so you aren’t constantly thinking, “Ok…what’s next?!”

Some tips:

• Take 15 minutes at night to sit down by yourself or with your partner to write out when you’ll be in meetings and need the other to cover. If you’re solo, schedule screen time or an involved craft that will keep the little one(s) busy at that time.
• Write in 1-2 hour blocks for: screen time, school/learning time, crafts, meals, and naps.
• Make the schedule large, colorful, and fun for kids to interact with. The more they feel like they’re in on the plan, the more likely they are to participate.
• Use Siri, Google Home, or Alexa to help with reminders. Sometimes kids listen to the robots more than their parents.

The key, though, is to be more flexible with this calendar than you are with your work schedule—assigning exact times to activities when dealing with kids is signing yourself up for a lot of unnecessary pressure and stress.

Now that we’ve got the schedule down, let’s get to the fun part: activities for kids to do at home!

Crafts Activities for Kids at Home

You know who your best friend is right now? Our Crafts for Kids at Home Pinterest Board! You’ll find plenty of ideas for different age ranges and levels of messiness (because sometimes you don’t want food coloring all over your house). Plus, many of them are easy enough so you can set your kids up and work next to them.

These home activities for kids also use a lot of things you most likely already have on hand. Don’t have pipe cleaners or whatever the craft calls for? Don’t sweat it—have the kids help you find something that could work just as well.

Online Learning Resources for Kids

If you have school-aged kids, chances are your school has set you up with online learning. Thank you, teachers! For those of us who have younger kids or just want to get some more ideas, check out these online learning resources for kids:

• Lunch Doodles with Mo Willems: kid’s book author, illustrator, and Sesame Street animator has partnered with The Kennedy Center to do drawing classes every day at 1 PM EST.
• America’s Test Kitchen: tons of kid-approved recipes. I see French toast in your future!
• NASA Kids’ Club: these free and fun activities for kids at home will take them to outer space and back.
• Noggin: Noggin has curated a list of free resources and videos that talk specifically about germs and forming healthy habits.
• Book Creator: with a free 90-day membership, your kids can create their own book!

Exercises & Yoga for Kids Online

We’re all spending a lot of time indoors, which doesn’t do much for getting those wiggles out. Whether you’re looking for yoga for kids at home or some outdoor activities to get everyone up and out, a little movement goes a long way in times like these.

• Cosmic Kids Yoga: plenty of free yoga and meditation videos for kids that are short and capture their attention.
• Fresh Start Fitness on GoNoodle: start the day with fun and easy-to-follow videos to keep kids moving at home (parent participation is an added bonus!).
• Take a nature walk: even if it’s just around your neighborhood, look for bugs, birds, and plants and talk about what you find. Remember to follow the six-foot social distancing rule.
• Dance it out: put your favorite music on and release some stress with silly dance moves.

Looking for working from home tips? See our new blog post about challenges and tips for working from home with kids and more.

From one parent to another—we will get through this. We’re not all educators, but we can do our best with activities for kids at home, and a little encouragement from one another.