Beat the Boredom in Quarantine

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Any of you returning to Beijing after a summer reconnecting with family in your home countries are probably facing the dreaded quarantine. The idea of a week or longer spent locked in a single room, no matter how luxurious, can seem daunting. But there are some things you can do to make the time meaningful, productive, and fun.

Utilize the Bathroom

There is so much fun to be had in this often overlooked area, and it makes maximum use of your limited space with relatively easy clean-up.

DIY Bubbles: Soap, water, dental floss. Most quarantine hotels will provide all three of these things, so let your kids experiment with making their own bubble solution and then use dental floss or shoelaces to create a bubble loop. Dip it in the solution and gently move the circle through the air to create bubbles. Try adding dye from found objects like colored paper or leftover juice to create crazy colors.

Shaving Cream Tactile Bin: Use Daddy or Mommy's shaving cream to cover a dry shower or tub floor. Mix in small manipulatives like buttons found in the hotel sewing kit or toys like Legos or plastic soldiers or animals for smaller pre-K kids. Older early elementary kids can trace shapes, letters or numbers in the foam using their finger or a chopstick for a fun way to practice writing skills.

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Bath Crayons: Easy to pack and great for a hotel bathroom, bath crayons allow kids to create a mural or practice their shapes, numbers, and letters. Any online ordering service will have them and there are tons of options. It’s hard to go wrong with Crayola, and Honeysticks offers an eco-friendly option that gets good reviews.

Work Out

Kids need to move, and the endorphin boost will give the whole family a sunnier disposition in a small space and ensure a more normal sleep cycle.

Pillow Fight: Keep it safe, but jumping around on the beds and flinging pillows at each other will not only get your heart pumping, but it’s also a novel thing they aren’t allowed to do at home and it can help make the confinement an adventure.

Dance Party: Tik Tok dance challenge anyone? Or download line dances you used to love like the Cupid Shuffle, Electric Slide, or the Macarena and educate the kids in old-school cool.

Workout Game: Use the deck of cards you’ve got to play a workout game. Each suit is a different exercise (hearts are jumping jacks and spades are push-ups, for example). Flip the first card and do the exercise the number of times specified by the number of the card. So, for example, the ten of hearts could mean doing ten jumping jacks.

Keep It Educational

According to the Northwest Evaluation Association, studies found that over the summer students forget as much as 34 percent of what they learned the previous year. But never fear! If you spend as little as 30 minutes a day reviewing with your child you can help ensure they go into the new school year well-informed and confident. Here’s how to make it a little more fun.

A deck of cards offers endless opportunities for entertainment and it’s a great way of teaching numbers, counting, sorting, and sequencing. Go Fish, War, Snap, Slapjack, Dòu Dìzhǔ … the amount of games is infinite and kids will play for hours. You can even play a version of Memory by matching the color and numbers but not the suits. Start a family tournament and keep a tally of who wins the most games. If you get bored with the games a quick internet search will give you endless lists of new games to try.

Family Book Club or Reading Challenge

During a lockdown, let the kids pick the book and then commit to reading it as a family. Read chapter one the first night and then discuss it at breakfast. Chapter two is the topic for that night's dinner convo, etc. Not only will this offer new things to discuss, it also encourages critical thinking and the ability to verbalize opinions and support them with facts. That’s an important life tool regardless of what field your kids eventually go into. If you need help, Scholastic’s website is a great resource for helping to choose age-appropriate books and to find book club guides for the discussion.

Reverse the Summer Slide

Find out which curriculum your school uses and determine the standards for each grade level. For example, if they follow US Common Core, you go to the website and discover Common Core Grade 2 math standards focus on addition, subtraction, measurements, and time. Find a few worksheets online for addition and subtraction or play a game where you ask them to guess the length/height of things in the room and then measure them using the measuring tape in the sewing kit.

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Project-Based Learning:

Everything is a learning opportunity, and those so-called “soft skills” like creative problem solving and critical thinking don’t happen automatically. Most people learn them through trial and error as they take on projects. Here are a few you can tackle with limited resources. And remember it's process not product. Not everything your kids make is gold, but what they learn by doing is platinum.

Movies: Sick of watching movies? Make one! There are tons of cool, easy movie apps now, from Canva to Video Leap, and most of them have a free basic version. Have the kids write their own movie script and then film and edit it. If they don’t want to act in it themselves, have them make puppets out of socks or coloring books. It’s a way to work on writing, sequencing, creative problem solving and to learn some technical skills on the computer as well.

Art: Make an art piece using found, disposable objects in the room. Old paper cups can be ripped into cool shapes for a collage and hotel room note paper is almost perfect origami squares. Extra plastic trash bags or shower caps make great koi kites and empty toiletry bottles or toilet paper rolls have endless possibilities. No glue? Could we use toothpaste, or tie it together with floss? Let them get creative and solve problems with a little out-of-the-box thinking.

Scrapbook: If you were on vacation there is a good chance you took a ton of photos. Turn them into a scrapbook, slide show, or journal of the trip. Whether digital or analog, the process of selecting photos and then recording what happened is a fun way to relive and remember all the fun you had. It also builds organizational, presentation, and storytelling skills, as a bonus!

Images: Canva

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