The long summer holidays are almost here and Betta Living have carried out some very interesting, not to mention worrying, research. They discovered that :
The cost of keeping a child entertained over the six-week school summer holiday is estimated to be anything from a whopping £1,000 to £1600 (which researchers have broken down to roughly £450 on entertainment, £340 food & drink, £119 on petrol and £100 on treats/misc costs (toys etc)) - eeeek !
The average number of days it rains in July is fourteen (that's around 1 in 3 days in the UK).
Research also shows that, on average, children lose about 2 months of skills over the summer, which is about 25% of the school year.
That all sounds rather depressing, but help is at hand ! Betta Living has put together a Kids In The Kitchen guide (that makes sense, they are fitted kitchen retailers after all !), aimed at inspiring parents with different activities that can all be done in the hub of the home and cost as little as 99p – many are free and use items already in the kitchen. They have also teamed up with life coach for children Naomi Richards, author of "The Parent’s Toolkit", to provide expert comment on how some of the activities will add to your child’s development while school’s out for summer.
They sent us through an amazing box of goodies to try out some of the activities. It was like Christmas and the kids got very excited as we unpacked it all. Amazingly, given the number of things inside, the whole lot only costs about £50 and there is absolutely loads to keep us busy.
Here is the checklist. You can find out more about the different activities and what you need on the Betta Living blog.
Juliette was instantly attracted to the packet of brightly coloured straws, for some reason ! I had a look through the activity cards and discovered that this was for number 16 : Hold Your Own Wacky Races. This involved creating a race track with straws then blowing a ping pong ball around it. Check out how much fun we had !
Loads of giggles for the price of a packet of straws and two ping pong balls !
Pierre had honed in on a bag of marshmallows. This is for number 19 : Build A Marshmallow Tower.
Using cocktail sticks to hold them together, we started creating a very wobbly tower. It was all going well until Juliette wanted to get artistic !
Boom ! The great thing is, when we'd finished playing, we got to eat all of the marshmallows !
There are still absolutely LOADS of things for us to play with in the box, so I'll be back to show you some more of our Kids In The Kitchen fun over the summer !
Disclosure : We received a box of goodies to get creative with.
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I love the checklist, I'm really keen for the children to be creative, but I don't always have the imagination to back it up! We are going to make the marshmallow towers first! :-)
ReplyDeleteWe haven't done the race yet, it looks great fun! And we got the Weetabix to build a tower rather than marshmallows. I have linked your post to mine. :)
ReplyDeleteWe have some Weeatbix to make faces with ! We're off to the beach later today and Juliette asked if we can take the sand toys "from the big red box" ! lol
DeleteCrafts are a great idea to keep the kids busy. Especially when it is raining outdoors, the children can be occupied, entertained with colourful items which tend to spark their interest. Often they will make use of their imagination.
ReplyDeleteRachel Craig