7 Activities Your Family Can Do While at Home during a Pandemic

*Collaborative Post.

If there’s one thing the current pandemic has taught the world, it is to stay at home for now. This also means taking extra care of yourself and your loved ones by eating right and practicing good personal hygiene, including social distancing, to prevent getting sick.

Your family may be among the many with this arrangement: you or your spouse is working from home, your kids are attending online classes, or homeschooling. Despite those activities, you may still feel that there’s too much time in your hands with commuting and errands taken out of the daily routine.

On a lighter note, here are more activities that the family can do to make most of the time at home, feel less bored, and maybe spend less time on their phones.

Play Good, Old-Fashioned Games 

Gather everyone around for a competitive game of scrabble. You can also select the best two players in the family for a game of chess. No timer, no problem as you can use an app for starting times, penalties, and the like on both games. 

There’s no limit to entertainment with board games, cards, and social deduction games. Don’t forget those jigsaw puzzles that have 40,000 pieces you can put together while the cat is away.

Pickle and Preserve

One of the best ways to extend a vegetable’s shelf life and have something healthy to eat in the coming days is pickling. Pickle cucumbers, carrots, cauliflowers, bell peppers—the list goes on for vegetables and even fruits that are available in your pantry.

The real work is creating the pickling juice, which you can do yourself. The kids can help with selecting and washing the vegetables, chopping using child-friendly knives or vegetable crinkle cutters, and arranging the pieces in the jar. They can add the spices before or after the brine is poured into the jar (depends on your recipe). Lastly, tap the jar to remove bubbles, tightly close the lid, and let it sit to cool.

Learn Something New Together 

There’s no lack of things to learn while staying indoors, from YouTube tutorials, to TED talks, to 

massive open online courses (MOOCs). Every family member, especially the young ones, can enroll in beginner HTML, drawing and watercolor painting, coding and programming, and foreign languages. And the best part is you can be there while they explore these topics.

Aside from online tutoring, the pandemic has highlighted the need for practical life skills. Best to teach your children how to cook, communicate with others, and maybe split firewood. 

Tend to Your Garden 

With limited times going out and fresh produce selling out fast, growing food in your garden is a wise move. Start digging in your yard to plant vegetables with some you can pickle or can later on. 

If space is an issue, turn to container gardening for onions, garlic, salad greens, and herbs. Sprouting lentils and microgreens is easy, if not the easiest thing, to grow indoors.

Catch Up on Home Repairs 

Now seems the opportune time to have a good look and act on repairs sitting on the backburner. There are about a hundred home-repair tasks that you can do without the help of a pro, as listed by The Family Handyman.

You can assign the nonelectrical and safer chores to the young ones, like cleaning the toilet or unclogging it, patching holes in the drywall, and stuff that looks like a science experiment. 

Clean, Clean, Clean

With everyone spending more time than usual indoors, it’s imperative to clean the house and disinfect it to keep diseases at bay. 

The kitchen, living room, and bathrooms are high-traffic areas that deserve deeper cleaning than other parts of the house. Because all hands are on deck, you can expect to finish this endeavor in record time.

Organize Your Closets 

While you are at it, dig deep into the closets and storage bins to organize clothes, accessories, toys, shoes, bags, and more. Which things spark joy, or which things others may find joy in?

Label the discarded items by donation, sale, or repurpose like kitchen towel rags. For things that you intend to sell online, store them neatly and carefully for posting on social media or your shop later on. Make sure they look clean and nice to get good prices. 

Those are a lot of things to do, enough to keep things occupied while the world seems to stop at a standstill. 

What’s your idea of a family-friendly activity during a time like this?