9 Things To Do At Home With Kids While You're Grounded

One of the easiest things to do at home with your kids is to just get the atta out, pour in some water and voila, you have your very own “organic playdough”. If only our mummies knew this could be a lucrative business idea back when we were kids, too. You could try making it with different colours by adding beetroot juice, palak juice or any other juice too. Coasters, dabba lids, forks, straws etc. can all be used to carve out different shapes and sizes. In case you’ve got fun cookie-cutters at home, try out a convenient baking recipe & pop in your masterpieces in the oven. Never too early to teach boys how to make perfectly round rotis! Want to indulge them a bit more?

Check out Colour Wheel's soft, handmade play dough. It's non-toxic, colourful and comes with wooden tools. It will keep them creating fun stuff for hours on end.

While it’s common to find kids at home with coloured fingers, toes, limbs & sometimes their whole selves, we’re talking about inculcating the idea of a green thumb early on in their lives. Kid-friendly activities like planting seeds and watching them sprout or just watering plants every day are bound to teach children to be responsible & accountable early on. Try an experiment that we did in school of planting moong seeds & wait for them to sprout in a day or two. Bring out the pichkaaris from Holi and have them water the plants with it.  If you do these activities at home early in the day, the kids can even get a healthy dose of Vitamin D. Always good to soak up some sun!

Tiny Acres, a Kolkata-based brand has a range of DIY Microgreen Grow Kits, you can use to teach your child how to grow everything from salad microgreens to pak choy microgreens at home. You may also want to check out Sow & Grow for DIY Gardening Kits and plantable stationery.

Take a bowl, mix all the different types of dals you have in your kitchen and ask your kids to sort them out according to colour. In addition to this, you could also trace out alphabets, numbers, animals on a sheet of paper and help the kids glue on dal on the outline. These activities for kids are great to help them develop their sensory skills and focus. This could get slightly messy & you don’t want to be stepping on tiny dals while walking barefoot so we totally recommend putting a sheet of newspaper before the kids begin.

If that doesn't go as planned, then these Activity Kits will surely help you out a great deal. I Learn N Grow, in particular, has some amazing games, activities and puzzles to not only keep your child away from harmful screens but to also make them pick up useful skills in the bargain.

You know the serenity you feel when kids do a lot of physical activity, tire themselves out and just doze off early? Well, keep that in mind when you’re trying this next indoor activity for kids. We’re asking you to break ‘em into a sweat with yoga and dance. Try engaging them in fun and creative poses like the shark pose or the horse pose! You can find a list of 58 poses right here. If you don’t feel like channelling your inner Baba Ramdev then put on their favourite songs and bust out some cool dance moves! And in case Baby Shark makes you want to pull your hair out, we totally recommend teaching them the moves to Macarena! #Only90sKidsWillRememberThis

Before you hit play on Macarena, take a quick look at this wooden balancing board from Vatsalya Toys. Perfect for training the little one's muscles, ligaments and tendons to work together in creating stability and improving body balance.

Brownie points if you remember this game we played in school. Since most of us are working from home, it may not be entirely possible to participate fully in a lot of activities with the kids throughout the day. So this one is for when you can continue working on your laptops but at the same time keep the kids busy, too. Pick a colour and ask them to find 3-5 objects of the same colour from anywhere in the house. You could even make this a timed activity with the older kids. Try and work out a reward for them if they successfully find enough for each colour. One of the best and easiest activities to do at home with the kids, this helps both motor and sensory skills. Alternatively, another fun activity to do for older kids is also setting up a treasure hunt of sorts with riddles for clues & a fun treasure at the end of it.

Loyora has magnetic wooden animal toys and STEM learning toys - a set of six cubes to build different objects with, so you can continue to WFH peacefully.

The kids are going to be home for what looks like a long time or so and it may not always be feasible to come up with new activities for them. It truly is the best time to get them involved with some basic chores around the house which will probably help in the long run. Or so we hope it does. Teach ‘em to fold washed clothes neatly, sort out that cupboard you’ve been meaning to do since forever or even get them to wash and scrub their toys which may have gotten dirty over time. One of the best things to do at home with kids is to involve them in prepping meals. You can look up a few kid-friendly kitchenware options and have them help you peel potatoes or even chop veggies. Who knows, maybe there’s a future Masterchef right there in your home!

You might want to use this time to get their help in organising their room and belongings. Cuddly Coo has lovely book shelves, stationery organisers, study desk organisers that you can get to inculcate a sense of tidiness in the little ones.

Since we’re on the topic of veggies, another fun art idea for kids at home is using different vegetables to paint. You can use them as a whole or slice them to get different sizes and textures for variety. Bhindi was a real hit with our little ones but you could also try broccoli, brinjal, cabbage etc. If you tend to easily misplace painting brushes like us, these are cool options you have readily available at home. Maybe they could give you a fancy tattoo with it because we know we always end up as their canvases eventually.

Playbug Toys has a set of paint your own peg dolls. This comes with a set of 6 wooden peg dolls, paints and a brush. Your kid can paint Mama, Papa, grandparents and siblings to create a happy colourful family with these.

Please don’t eat cardboard out of frustration of being stuck at home. A cool art and craft idea for the kids at home is using all the cardboard around the house like shoe boxes, tissue boxes, cereal boxes etc. to make different things. You could glue together a couple of shoe boxes and build a parking lot with slides for your toy cars or even come up with a small maze. We found a site with a few easy-to-do things at home with cardboard and you can check it here.

You can check out the Bombay Toy Company too for such non-restrictive, open-ended toys that will boost your child's imagination and creativity.

We saved the best for last because we know being indoors 24/7 with children can get exhausting but it’s also a wonderful time to bond with them considering how busy we are otherwise. Build a pillow fort or make a simple tent by tying up corners of a double bedsheet for your kids and pretend to be camping in the woods! Fire up their imagination with some thrilling stories like the Gruffalo series and hone your acting skills in the process! For the younger ones, talk to them about different animals in the jungle, what sounds they make, etc. This indoor activity for kids is all kinds of thrilling!

Amp up your stay at home game with a teepee tent from Baby Jalebi and an Alphie (alphabet cushion toy) from Stuffies. Play peek-a-boo, hide and seek, or camp out in your balcony. Super fun!

The authors of this article have imagined this piece in an ideal scenario and we totally understand you can’t put ideal and kids in the same sentence. We’re wishing you all the best to power through these trying times, dear parents especially those with toddlers. Our homes have turned into graffiti parks too. Stay strong, soldier!