You well know that I am an advocate for boredom. Ha!
But I think kids should get to the point of boredom at times because it stretches them to be creative. That said, I also like to give my children prompts to explore.
I am always looking for things that will pique my children鈥檚 interest and engage them in self-led discovery or imaginative play. One way of doing that, which I have found successful, is to create discovery areas or bins. Here are a few of my favourites.
Science Lab Water Play: In the summer I like to set out a bin of plastic test tubes, stir sticks, various sized water containers and items like glitter and food colouring. I give them a large bucket of water or the hose if they can be trusted, and let them set about mixing and creating 鈥減otions.鈥�
It actually keeps them entertained for a quite a while and often leads to role playing games like scientist or pharmacist.
Writing Station: I am a lover of all things stationary and this gives me reason to buy all the cute items. I set up a desk area in our home of post-it notes, cute notebooks, pencils, pens, stamps, stickers, envelopes, markers, staplers and paper clips, and they naturally gravitate towards it and just create.
Sometimes they are actually writing and drawing, and sometimes they are fake writing and consumed more with the packaging and folding of the papers, to send or leave secret codes or instructions.
Scrap Wood: Typically I always have a construction project on the go so I keep a bin of all my wood scraps for the kids to explore with. I will purpose set out hand tools appropriate for their age with markers or paint, and let them build.
They may just be stacking or they may be pounding nails. The blocks of woods can easily be transformed into little towns (houses drawn on the blocks) or stacked into bridges and towers. It鈥檚 great for their imaginations as well as to foster spatial reasoning and such.
