Reducing screen time by staying away from TVs, phones and tablets, whether it’s through activities to do at home or in your local area, is a great way to boost your health and wellbeing. It can also enhance family connections and help you rediscover the joys of nature. Our new homes and neighbourhoods are designed to support active and healthy lifestyles, with green spaces perfect for picnicking, play areas primed for climbing, and footpaths and cycle routes connecting you with your wider community. In this article we’ll provide lots of ideas for screen free activities and activities for kids at home.
Fun screen free activities for kids at home
If you’ve moved to a new Redrow home, then you’ll have an abundance of living space to explore inside your property, including our open plan areas that are ideal for spending quality family time and kitchens that inspire cooks and bakers of all ages to be creative.
Make the most of your extra room in your new Redrow home by planning some exciting children's activities at home. Traditional screen free activities such as scavenger hunts can be really easy to set up. Simply hide items around your home for children to find or set them tasks to collect items of a particular colour or beginning with a selected letter of the alphabet. If you’re feeling ambitious you can turn it into a mystery to solve using clues leading from one place to the next.
Hide and seek is another favourite for young and old, which requires little more than some imagination and encourages active play, especially in our Heritage Collection homes, which provide spacious layouts and lots of flexible rooms.
Investing in a quality board game collection is well worth it if you’re committed to reducing screen time long-term. Newer games, such as Outsmarted and Block Party are popular and older games such as Scrabble, The Game of Life and the property -buying game Monopoly are also enjoying a resurgence on the bestseller lists.
More mindful activities at home include cooking and baking together. You can introduce children to baking with simple recipes such as homemade scones, fruit crumble or an apple cake. Let them take the lead on reading recipes and weighing ingredients, if they’re able to.
Encourage creativity through arts and crafts. If they usually love playing games online, ask them to design a new game on paper, with characters, levels, items to collect and even controllers. If they feel crafty they could make it 3D using cereal boxes or build it in Lego or blocks. Or, if they love story telling, inspire them to create their own comic strip – this can be about their own life or they can invent their own superhero complete with unique superpower.
For more Screen Free Week activities read our summer holiday activity ideas and keep a look out for our new playmaking campaign, which is set to relaunch soon to encourage children to embrace outdoor play.
Mindful Moments: Screen free family relaxation ideas
Family life can be hectic, with work, school, evening clubs and sports-filled weekends, so you may crave more calming activities that don’t involve screens. Trying out some mindfulness activities at home can be a great opportunity to remove the external noise and focus on each other.
If you already have a Redrow home, why not make the most of its spacious layout by creating a cosy reading or art corner – this may be a bright corner of the lounge or a space in a child’s bedroom.
Our Harrogate house type, for example, features a ‘broken plan living’ layout downstairs, with the family area off the kitchen the ideal space to utilise. Take turns to read your all-time favourite book or poem to encourage reading confidence. Or let your artistic side shine with a family sketching task. Each choose another member of the family to sketch and create your own family caricatures to frame.
Focusing on staying screen free can make you feel like you have much more time to spare. Use this new found time to take steps to create a clutter-free home that can be better enjoyed together. Task each member of the family with reducing their clutter and donating items they no longer want or need to charity. This could lead to rearranging certain rooms in your home to create more useable living space. For more inspiration read our advice on how to feng shui your home.
Gardening activities to inspire young nature lovers
Simply going outdoors is the easiest way to remove all temptation of screen time. Leave your phones inside and embrace everything nature has to offer in your own back garden.
Our thoughtfully designed homes include private garden spaces that offer a blank canvas to be creative with your layout, seating areas and planting as well as providing a space to enjoy nature activities for kids.
One of the best ways to nurture a love of gardening activities for kids is to get them involved in growing their own food from a young age. This gives them a tangible benefit as they can enjoy the literal fruits of their labour from juicy strawberries and tomatoes to easy to grow herbs and salad leaves. Fruit and vegetable patches are also havens for pollinators such as bumblebees.
You could also aim to create a butterfly friendly garden by adding pollen rich flowers, such as sweet peas in a sunny patch. Children will love to study the new wildlife in their garden. Make sure to add shelter with more dense shrubs or wood piles and water in the form of shallow puddles, while avoiding pesticides or flowers with a low value to pollinators. Attract even more butterflies by leaving out overripe fruit for them to feed on.
Taking part in “No Mow May”, which encourages you to let your lawn grow for the month, is another wonderful way to give insects in your garden access to more food and habitats for this key month in their lifecycles.
If you already live on a Redrow development, take time to explore the green spaces nearby, where we like to encourage bumblebees and butterflies with wildflower areas. The thought we put into designing our neighbourhoods as sustainable living communities ensures there are plenty of outdoor activities for kids on your doorstep from play areas to nature walks and cycle paths.
For more gardening inspiration read our garden planting ideas by season or switch your focus from garden wildlife activities back to play and discover our favourite outdoor game ideas for summer.
Outdoor adventures in your neighbourhood
To mark Screen Free Week and further inspire your screen free day activities, we’re encouraging you to go on an adventure in and around one of our family-friendly neighbourhoods.
Why not explore the area around your Redrow development including your nearest nature trail, park, or cycle track, while playing a game of “nature bingo” and counting as many species of plants, trees and wildlife as you can while you’re outdoors. Enjoying the benefits of nature on your doorstep is a great way to stay away from screens.
Fun activities near you could also include community days, local summer fetes and sports clubs, where you can meet your neighbours and share in the enjoyment of the great outdoors. Outdoor play areas and communal open space are popular on many of our developments as places where residents can meet up to socialise and spend time together. This helps to build a sense of community spirit especially on our garden village developments which often incorporate many interconnected areas of green space.
Why not extend your screen free time into the evening and spend a night under the stars camping in your back garden? Back yard camping ideas include creating your own campfire and toasting smores (melted marshmallows between two chocolate digestive biscuits), star gazing with a children’s telescope or sharing stories into the night.
Living on a Redrow development provides so many opportunities to spend time outside and in natural surroundings so why stop at Screen Free Week? Find the perfect family home at a new Redrow development near you today.
