After schoolies

[jax clinch]

After saying no to doing after school children I have given in and now have a 10 yr old boy and 8 yr old girl before and after school. Just wondering what others do... Do you plan specific activities, have an after school box of bits.... Let them play on wii??...my house is all set up for pre schoolers so not much at their disposal!!! X

[Nicola Carlyle]

You'd be surprised. I sit out boxes of duplo/mega blocks, action figures, board games etc before I do the school run and when we come home after snack they set everything out and play with it without any encouragement from me. If I don't sit anything out they say they are board or they end up pushing each other around in the toy pushchairs or on the wheelies but they are generally good at amusing themselves. If they want the TV on they know it MUST be baby tv or likes to accommodate the younger kids (TV isn't on a lot as you can imagine). I do some activities with them. Coming up to Easter, Christmas part of our topic etc we quite often do some painting, baking, crafty things. As long as I don't have something planned every day then they are fine with it. Hope that helps oh and my after school age range is 1-9 years inclusive at the moment.

[nikkiv]

I tend to have an activity planned for the after schoolies, so the other evening we made two tone muffins, the following evening we decorated them! I work on a theme so at the moment we are doing weather and we are making a big weather display and I get the after schoolies to do the more complicated parts of this. I also buy cheap puzzle books, mazes activities and photocopy the pages so that hey all have the same, so last week we all designed our own mosh I monsters. Next week we're making spoon puppets, Easter cakes and cards

[watgem]

mine enjoy choosing word searches/mazes/crosswords off the internet to do (Activity village is good for this) we're doing planting and cooking in the holidays, they like tv, lego, I have one of those big puzzle mazes in a ball which they enjoy, but equally they often enjoy the toddler toys and the sensory tray, all 3 played in the rice tray with the LOs yesterday! hthxxx

[*daisychain*]

Some days I plan craft activities so they are too giddy running about , we cook or bake on Wednesdays but most the time they just want to play in the garden

[skatie]

I'm in my element, my only after schoolie is a crafter (yay) so we have made a theatre, with puppets and she wrote a story and interchangeable day/night scenes (this took a good many afternoons to do and she then did her show for mum). We did some felt sewing of little ow lies for Mother's Day. Air drying clay was also a big hit and many weird and wonderful creatures were made. This week she made some fab Easter eggs out of large pine cones, covered in tissue paper and lots of sparkles stuck to it. I'm having to keep one step ahead of her and make sure I've got something up my sleeve as it's the first thing she asks when we get home 'what can I make today?' Lol! Love it! My ds says crafting is boring so I'm going to make a dinosaur garden with him over the hols.