Your guide to keeping your kids enriched during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has brought big changes for everyone, including families with kids. The biggest challenge for parents has been the overwhelming feeling of uncertainty with isolation, restrictions, working from home, plus home-schooling children and no holiday’s to look forward to.

Furthermore, many have lost their jobs, been stood down or been made redundant so there are extra challenges for families to face as they prepare for what life looks like post COVID-19. It’s a massive roller-coaster of emotions, to say it’s been a stressful and challenging time is an absolute understatement!

Thankfully, we are doing well here in Australia and the restrictions that were put in place have worked to reduce the spread of the virus to very low levels. That means we are now enjoying some more freedoms including kids getting back to school and rejoining many of their out-of-school activities like sports classes. Despite this, things can change very quickly with this virus and we need to be vigilant to avoid a second wave. We will be living in this ‘new normal’ for a while to come.

To help families navigate through these challenging times, we spoke to Noble Oak to share our best tips for keeping kids happy and enriched during the pandemic.

Tips for Coping During The Pandemic

First of all, take a deep breath, don’t be so hard on yourselves and take it day by day. These steps have certainly helped us as a family and a community manage this unprecedented time:

Routine is key: Maintain some sort of daily routine for both you and the kids is essential to working through tasks and balancing your day.

Set up learning areas for children where it’s quiet and they can concentrate, as well as a work area for you if you’re working from home. Don’t try to do your work and teach your children at the same time, it’s impossible and frustrating. Get kids teaching out of the way in the morning, and allow time in the afternoon for your work.

Ensure everyone is being active every day. The benefits of physical activity are well documented and contribute to everyone’s mental and health well-being. Going for walks, ride’s, scoot or a run, whatever your family is into. Get out for at least an hour every day — your body and mind will thank you.

Encourage conversations on how you are all feeling. These are unprecedented times, we all have bad days and it’s perfectly normal. A simple discussion about how we are feeling can make us feel better and encouraging children to talk about what they are experiencing is essential for developing those life skills around communication.

Keeping Kids Active & Connected

We are experiencing what has been described as a once in a 100 year crisis, however it doesn’t mean life stops. This crisis will teach us all about mindset, resilience and what’s really important.

At Sport Star Academy we had to restructure and innovate our business model to support our young community in keeping active during this time. We went from providing a typical face-to-face sport program, to online, live and virtual programs.

Our Virtual Football (soccer) Classes have been able to provide young children with the opportunity to continue training and learning the skills of a sport they love. By doing so we are also able to provide families with a sense of routine, normality and in some cases even their PE lesson!

There are many other online activities families can tap into such as STEM type learning and music. Also Facetime or Zoom play dates have been awesome to stay connected to their friends. My daughter recently had a Facetime playdate with a friend and they played Guess Who together. Who would have thought? Technology can be truly be wonderful!