With Easter fast falling on all of us, it’s time to start thinking of new and creative ways to spend time with the kids. All holidays call for some sort of creative activity to keep the kids (and adults!) entertained, and Easter is one of those fun holidays where the weather can be great and you can spend your days in parks and on family, but then it could also rain and get miserable for two weeks and you find yourself looking for fun things to do inside. It’s always complicated.

There are many activity books on the market designed to entertain children on bad weather days, on long car trips, or on trips to visit friends and family. These books are great, often colourful, and task oriented, providing real focus for children. However, they are also generic and often repetitive in terms of content and the activities they suggest completion. Homemade activity books that are tailored to individual children are so much better!

Creating your own activity books for your children is a wonderful way to make sure that all the activities contained in the book are attractive to your specific children. It’s also a fun way to stretch your own creative muscles, something that’s so important in adult life and often gets lost in the mundane routines of housework, school life, work life, and family responsibilities. By creating your own activity book for children, there is also the opportunity for them to help you create the activity book in the first place – a fun activity in its own right!

So what kinds of things can go into an activity book? Well, as discussed above, the beauty of creating your own activity book is that you have control over the activities in it. The content of the book will also depend on the age of the child or children who will be using the book. However, some common ideas for activities that might suit a variety of children and ages include:

– Write a story about the image. Cut out a small sketch or picture from a magazine and paste it at the top of a page. Then give the children the task of writing a story about the picture in front of them, asking them to be as imaginative as they want.

– Finish the award. Start a story by writing an opening line and ask them to finish it.

– I spy. Choose an accessible room in your house, such as the kitchen, and ask children to list all the items they can find in that room that begin with a chosen letter, such as the letter M.

– All about me. Provide space for children to draw and write about themselves.

– Create a character. Write some adjectives that could be used to describe a fictional character and ask the children to draw what they think of when they hear these words.