Under-fives have energy to burn, and if you are struggling for activities, distractions, or fulfilling pursuits for your children whilst isolating or spending more time at home, the experienced childcare team at the Yarraville Community Centre are here to offer some excellent tips.
The Yarraville Community Centre (YCC) offers high quality, affordable childcare in a happy, safe and healthy environment for children aged from 6 months to 5 years and are currently taking enrolments for 2022.
Kimberly who has a child attending YCC’s childcare service says, “I highly recommend YCC Occasional Child Care. Their wealth of experience and caring nature made my son’s transition into childcare a positive experience. They have survived and thrived through endless lockdowns and restrictions, so a big thank you to the wonderful team.”
Here are YCC’s top five tips for families in isolation:
Get Creative
Gather up all your broken crayons. Get a silicone cube container (any shape will do) and place the different groups of colours into each hole. Melt them in the microwave for 1 minute. Allow the crayons to fully dry. Once dried take out of the moulding. You can mix and match the coloured crayons or keep the same colours together.
Blow up some balloons
Hand your child an empty paper towel roll and see if they can bat the balloon into a laundry basket. Alternatively, forget the bat and see if they can kick it from a start line to a finish line.
Read a book (slightly differently)
To make storytime more active, choose a book that has a lot of repetition, like The Magic Beach by Alison Lester or Green Eggs and Ham by Dr Seuss. Settle on a magic word (one that’s repeated a lot in the story, like beach or green) and challenge your child to stand up and sit down every time they hear the word.
Get physical
Invent some silly walks and runs with your child. You could play guess the animal game, where you run like a monkey, jump like a bunny, flap like a bird and so on and get them to do the same.
Sensory Play
Rainbow spaghetti is such a good material to use for sensory play!
Rainbow Spaghetti Recipe:
- Cook the spaghetti following the instructions on the pack. Drain and rinse the spaghetti.
- Put the spaghetti into ziplock bags. You will need one zip lock bag per colour. Add food colouring and a few drops of water to each bag.
- Zip the ziplock bags up and mix the spaghetti and food colouring together. Squash it, squeeze it, throw it in the air, just keep moving the colour around the bag until all of the spaghetti is totally covered. Repeat with each colour.
- Once all of the spaghetti is covered in food colouring put each colour into your colander and rinse the spaghetti under the tap. This step is really important, if you miss it out your child will end up covered in food dye!
- Put the rainbow coloured spaghetti into a container or tub and it is ready to be played with.
There are lots of cheap, cheerful and uncomplicated ways to keep young children busy whilst spending more time at home.
Head over to The Yarraville Community Centre’s blog www.ycc.net.au/category/community-engagement/ for more tips on keeping the children entertained.
To book a tour or to find out more about the centre’s childcare services visit www.ycc.net.au/childcare/ or phone 9687 1560.
