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Activities for children for holidays and weekends
It can sometimes be difficult to think of ways to entertain your children or grandchildren during the holidays. Maybe you need some ideas to inspire a screen-free weekend; or perhaps you want to bless a friend or family member by offering to look after their children for a day but aren’t sure how you’ll manage to fill the time! Well, we’ve created some fun, free, downloadable activities to help you out.
From friendship bracelets, to kindness coupons, these indoor activities for children will give you lots of ideas – either for children’s independent play, or for you to enjoy with them together.
1. Free activities for kids: DIY friendship bracelet
Friendship is a massive blessing from God. Nothing beats laughing about something silly with a good friend, sharing a joke or fun times. This holiday, teach your children about the value of friendship by making a friend or family member these amazing friendship bracelets!
What you’ll need:
- Coloured card (3 colours)
- Scissors
- Pencil
- Ruler
- Glue
sharing with your children about friendship
As you make the friendship bracelets, why not take time to chat through the value of friendship with you children. For example …
Jesus had friends that he spent lots of time with. They were his disciples and the gospels are full of stories of what they got up to together as Jesus taught them about why he had come. He was also a friend to all kinds of people, including many who others didn’t want to be friends with.
Friendship is a wonderful thing and we can make a big difference to other people by being their friend.
2. Inspiring things to make with children: Kindness coupons
Encourage your children to make their own kindness coupons and give them to friends and family as presents. Print out the coupons below, colour them in and add in your own ideas of how you can show kindness and compassion to your friends and family.
sharing with your children about kindness
Another word for compassion is kindness. If you see someone who’s sad and want to be kind to them to cheer them up, you’re showing compassion.
We can trust God, as ruler of the world, to always do what is kind and right because He is perfect. He is good and loving. He is slow to anger, full of love and faithfulness. What brilliant news for us that we have a compassionate and gracious God! He is kind to us and forgives us when we don’t do what’s right.
If you’re interested in teaching your children more about showing kindness to others, you may want to consider sponsoring a child with Compassion.
Sponsoring a child is a great way to teach children about God’s heart for the poor. You can sponsor a child who’s of a similar age to your child, or who shares their birthday. Your children can write to the child you sponsor and see first-hand how you’re coming alongside a child in poverty so they can access nutritious food, a safe place to play, plus the opportunity to go to school.
3. Great holiday activities: Encouraging bookmarks
Help children understand how precious they are by colouring in one of these bookmarks. One is for them to keep so that they can remember how treasured they are. The other is to send to a friend or to the child you sponsor to remind them how dearly they are loved by God as well.
What you’ll need:
- Card
- Scissors
- Colouring pencils
sharing with your children about identity
There are no mistakes in God’s work. He lovingly created each person. The Bible says that when we were still inside our mother, God was knitting us together.
When people around us say mean things or misunderstand us, we can sometimes feel those mean words stick to us and begin to change the way we feel about ourselves.
Instead of letting other people tell us who they think we are, we can know who we are by reading what God thinks of us in the Bible. As He made us, He is the very best person to know who we are. The Bible says God knows our thoughts, every hair on our head, and even every word we’re going to say before we say it!
4. Things to do with the children: Bible verse word search
This Bible verse word search is a great holiday activity to help children understand the depths of God’s love for them. See if your children can find all the words that describe what love is in this word search; use it with your grandchildren, or as a Sunday club activity.
What you’ll need:
- Paper
- Pen or pencil
sharing with your children about God’s love
Loving other people can be really hard. It’s easy to love people when they are kind to us, or when they’re popular and everyone else seems to love them. But what about those people that other people don’t seem to like that much? Or people who are not kind to us? That’s much harder.
God showed us the most amazing love by sending His Son to die and defeat death, coming back to life, to save us from our sins. Because of Him, we can be friends with God. What great love!
Holiday activities: Global citizens
Teach your children about being aware of the world around them and help them to understand they are part of a global family in which we’re all responsible for each other. Print off a copy of this Global Citizens game, one for each person joining the activity and find out how global each of you are!
What you’ll need:
- Paper / worksheets
- Pens or pencils
sharing with your children about being a global citizen
We are all global citizens, whether we realise it or not. We rely on many people around the world for the food we eat and the clothes we wear.
Next time you are in a supermarket, look at where your fruit and vegetables were grown. Very often they have travelled a long way to get to your local shop.
As so much of what we do and buy affects people from different countries, we need to make sure that they are treated well and receive fair pay for their work. One of the best ways of making sure this happens is to look out for the Fairtrade Mark. It is a guarantee that the people involved in producing your food were paid well for their work.
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