http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XEN4vtH4Ic

Buying new toys often enough to keep your child stimulated gets expensive and also take sup a lot of space at home.  Yet is it fun and exciting to get new toys for your children.

Many towns and cities have a toy library where you can borrow toys in the same way as you can borrow books for the public library.  The toy libraries charge for lending toys and there may be a membership fee as well.

Toy libraries have loads of educational toys, games and puzzles, outdoor equipment for a range of different age groups and stages of development.

Borrowing is also a good way of finding out just how interested your child is in a particular toy so you can try before you buy.

It sounds as if its time to head out before the scraps and bickering start. 

The public library

What better place to spend a few hours with a range of books than the local public library.  You don’t have to borrow the books and take them home.  You can spend time in the library reading, browsing, playing board or card games even.  You can curl up in an armchair or a bean bag. It’s free and its suitable for all age groups.

As a bonus you can take books home if you are a library member.  There are also CDs, DVDs to choose from (there is usually a small charge for these).

Most public libraries run a free holiday programme for children of various ages with arrange of activities.  These are usually very popular and you may need to book ahead.

 Public swimming pools

You’ve done the library and now what?  Well the all-year-round public swimming pools that are covered and heated are also a great place to hang out for a few hours on a wet day with children of all ages.

Although there is an entry fee, it is usually very reasonable, even for a family.

Most of these pools (or aquatic centres) have water slides, blowup castles and other stuff in the water for the children to play on and slide down.  Great fun!  The adult caregivers are more likely to get bored before the kids do.

You need to be at a footbridge across a river for this game.

1.  Find a selection of sticks or twigs, preferably 20-30 cm long.
2. Everyone stands on the upstream side of the bridge and each person drops a stick into the water at the same time
3. Then run to the other side of the bridge and watch to see whose stick gets under the bridge first.
4. Repeat until you run out of sticks.

1. Hold the stone between the thumb and first finger, resting on the second finger of your upturned hand..
2. Take your arm back to just behind your body about hip high, with elbow bent, then bring it forward again quickly and flick the stone from your fingers into the water so the stone flies low towards the water
3. Count how many times the stone bounces off  the water before it sinks. 

 If you have bicycles, consider taking a picnic lunch or snacks and head off on the bikes.  You can go to the nearest playground, river, beach or lake and let the children run off their excess energy before having lunch or a snack and riding home again.

 If you have a playground, river, bush walk, lake or beach within walking distance, then do the same on foot.

 In larger towns and cities, use public transport to get to places where children can run free for a while. many public transport have family tickets for a day out.

Ingredients

2 cups white flour
2 cups cold water
blue, red and green food colouring

Method

1  Put water into a large bowl
2  Add the flour half a cup at a time
3  When all the flour has been added, divide the mixture into three smaller bowls
4  Add different coloured food colouring to each bowl
5  Mix well

You also need:

• Sheets of paper – recycled computer paper, clean newsprint or brown paper are ideal.  Even old newspapers can become unrecognisable when ‘fingerpainted’
• An old adult shirt to cover each child

It is best to have this activity in the kitchen, outside or somewhere with no carpet underfoot.

If you must let your child loose with  finger paint in a carpeted room, do put down a large sheet of heavy plastic or several old sheets or heaps of newspaper to cover every possible place the finger paint can be dropped or flicked!

Preparation for messy play like this saves a lot of stress and tension so everyone can enjoy this time.

It is a good habit to encourage your child to help clean up after finger painting, or any activity really.

The salt plays two roles – it makes the mixture inedible (though I’m sure some of you will have experienced children eating it anyway! And tried it yourself many years ago!) and keeps it from getting sticky.

Other equipment includes bits and pieces from the kitchen cupboards and drawers, like the rolling pin (or other cylindrical implement, maybe a plastic bottle filled with water to give it some weight), cookie cutters, plastic beakers, spoons, forks, blunt knives or something similar.

If your child wants to try to ‘bake’ the play dough, be sensible about using the real oven in case s/he decides to do it at another time when you’re not in the kitchen.

A cardboard carton suitably painted to look like an oven or stove is a more suitable alternative

Children can get a great percussion orchestra going that will only stop when your ears have had enough.  The pot lids make wonderful cymbals, or an upside down pot can be drummed with a wooden spoon.

Plastic food containers can be stacked inside each other, or piled up on top of each other.  Or the drawer is emptied and then everything put away again – all part of the game.  Your child will work out what s/he can do.

The main ingredients are:

• The kitchen sink, bathroom hand-basin, a plastic bucket, or a no longer used baby bath
• Water from the tap
• Stool or step for child to stand on.

Young children will happily splash in the water with some simple kitchen utensils, such as wooden spoons, measuring cups, plastic spoons.

If you want to keep someone small occupied while you are cooking dinner, then the kitchen sink is ideal.

Don’t worry about how wet they get. It is only water and their clothes can be changed afterwards.