Cracking fun!
Don’t miss our fab guide to enjoying the Easter holidays while staying at home...
1 Organise an Easter egg hunt Get the children making eggshaped clues that you can fill in and hide around the house and garden.
Be a bit more creative with hiding places if you’re a bit limited in garden space – how about in the cutlery drawer or behind a pillow?
The whole family can get involved and the best bit about organising your own one is you can choose the chocolate, and don’t have to share it with anyone.
You could also make a treasure map for the children to follow.
2 Escape into a new adventure You can’t visit Harry Potter World over Easter, but you could try creating a Harry Potter escape room at home.
You can complete this escape room as a group or as individual.
You can compete against friends and try it multiple times.
The story unfolds during your first year at Hogwarst School of Witchcraft and Wizardy, but suddenly the rooms goes dark and you are off on your own journey.
Follow the clues by googling Hogwarts Digital Escape Room.
Other escape room firms such as www.escapefromhome.co.uk have set up free experiences that you can also try out at home, or if you were very inventive you could come with your own.
3 Look after an egg A great way of getting younger children into a routine and, at the same time, they are learning without realising it.
Hard boil an egg, get them to decorate it using paint and pens and choose a name.
And the eggs, if they make it that far, can be replaced with a chocolate one on Easter Sunday.
4 Join Joe Wicks and other celebrities Online classes from stars like Oti Mabuse and Joe Wicks are still going on over the Easter holidays.
The fitness instructor has been helping the nation stay healthy while stuck indoors with his PE classes every weekday, which aren’t just for kids. The half-hour sessions are all uploaded to his YouTube channel so you can watch them when it suits you.
Children’s author and comedian David Walliams is releasing a free audio story every day for a month to help keep youngsters entertained while they are at home. Find out more at www.worldofdavidwalliams.com.
5 Get out and about on the farm Easter and Spring is a busy time on the farm.
And thanks to modern technology you can learn more about what happens at this time of the year from your home.
The lambing season has finished for 2020 at the St Fagans National Museum of History in Cardiff.
They have welcomed more than 300 lambs into the world this year and you they have some videos of the highs and lows that they have experienced along the way.
Farms are great places for learning, and thanks to the LEAF Virtual Farm Walk – www.virtualfarmwalk.org/walk – you can go from field to field exploring the British countryside.
In the Dig Deeper section there are further materials and activities designed for 11-13 year olds.
6 Get crafty! There are lots of craft idea around Easter. There are also plenty of things they can make from everyday items, such as castles with the turrets made of old kitchen and toilet roll tubes Or make stained glass Easterthemed window decorations using black paper, tissue paper and glue.
Former primary school teacher Catherine Lynch from PlanBee (www. planbee.com) says: “Cut out the shape you would like to display. Your children could make eggs, rabbits, chicks, religious crosses, flowers or anything that takes their fancy.
“Place strips of black paper across the design: we found that this made sticking the tissue paper easier.
“Rip or cut tissue paper and stick it inside your design. Wait for it to dry and display it in the window. It will cheer the neighbours at this difficult time!”
7 Egg decoration Decorating your own egg can be fun for all the family.
This is another tip from Catherine Lynch at PlanBee.
She says: “First wash out the shells of cracked eggs. If possible, keep the two sides of the egg shells in their pairs to help you match them later. Wait for them to dry.
“Glue the two shells back together and cover them with tissue paper. The tissue paper will reinforce the joined cracked eggs together.
Wait for the tissue paper to dry and then decorate to your heart’s content!
“Top tips: preparing the eggs is quite fiddly and probably be beyond the reach of very young children, but they can join in the decoration.”
Always wash your hands after handling the egg shells.
8 Host a quiz night Get the family together for a quiz night, which could be on topics ranging from music to sport, Disney to how much you know about Wales.
You can get the whole family involved using FaceTime or Zoom, or other online apps -such as Kahoot!
The children could run it themselves and come up with the questions and play the part of the quizmaster.
9 Have an Easter party Create your only playlist, get dressed up and head downstairs for your own Easter disco or party. You could find a video online of disco flashing lights, turn the lights off and have sweets and crisps on offer. If it would work in your street, you could even organise an event like the families at a housing estate who have found a way to keep the lockdown blues away by holding a nightly disco from their doorsteps. Around 20 families come out to dance and sing during the nightly social event complete with smoke machines and glow sticks in Morganstown, Cardiff.
10 Bake an Easter cake While they can’t take part in home economics at school at the moment, if they enjoy baking then you could get them to make a dessert for the family.
If not, they could just help out with cooking dinner and learn some new skills and in the future do it for themselves.
Get them to research the recipe online, write it down and then you can help them follow the instructions.
11 Create an obstacle course Weather dependant, but it is a great way to keep the family active and can be made with things around the house such as plant pots, tennis balls and books which can be balanced on the head. See who can complete the course in the quickest time, or do it as a relay, and if you have enough space
inside you could create an indoor one too. Get a timer set up and work out everyone’s time.
12
Pencil and paper games
You could play games such as Consequences, where each person writes a section of a story then folds the paper over and passes it to the next person and this continues until it has gone the whole way round and each player then reads out their random, and often very funny, story.
Another game sees you list a range of categories, such as school subject, boy’s name and girl’s name, then pick a letter of the alphabet and see how many categories you can complete starting with that letter in two minutes.
Or you could play What or Who Am I? using sticky padded paper.
13
Take a virtual museum tour
From the diplodocus to the dodo, London’s Natural History Museum’s vast collection might be closed to the viewing public.
But you can still get lost in the corridors and gallery spaces in this interactive online guide – www.artsandculture.google.com/partner/ natural-history-museum
One treat is Dippy the dino, who despite recently going on tour and being in Cardiff still makes an appearance in the entrance hall.
There are similar tours of the British Museum (www.britishmuseum.org), The National Portrait Gallery (www. nationalgallery.org.uk) and the Vatican Museums in Rome (www.museivaticani.va).
14
Tour the world
Holidaying abroad is cancelled for the foreseeable, but you can still tour the world virtually.
From hikes to Everest and Patagonia, a jaw-dropping ascent of El Capitan to a bird’s eye view of the Grand Canyon, there so much to see online.
Hike the canyon’s Bright Angel Trail via a Google Street View Trek, while the Norwegian Lights over Lapland project (www.lightsoverlapland.com/abiskonational-park-virtual-reality-tour) takes travellers on a five-minute journey through a series of 360-degree videos of the phenomenon.
15
West End show performed in your living room
Get on your finest going out gear on and make a night of one of your favourite shows being streamed into your living room.
The National Theatre (www.nationaltheatre.org/nt-at-home) is streaming a free performance of a much-loved show every Thursday.
Not to be outdone, the king of musical theatre himself, Andrew Lloyd Webber, will be streaming a production of one of his musicals on YouTube each week for free.
Called, The Shows Must Go On! – www.youtube.com/theshowsmustgoon – it began with the 2000 adaptation of Joseph And The Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat.
Each show will be available for a limited 48-hour period online every Friday from 7pm, with Jesus Christ Superstar, starring Tim Minchin, Chris Moyles and Mel C being the next on the list for the Easter weekend.
16
Have space to learn
The International Space School Educational Training has launched a series of YouTube events that will feature a guest NASA astronaut. Full details can be found at: www.isset.org
Space to Learn is an hour long free live interactive podcast featuring an astronaut who will present and narrate videos of the inspiration of venturing into space followed by a live Q&A with children.