Staycations

As much as we love our kiddos, school breaks can be challenging.  If you’re working, you need to arrange childcare or take vacation days yourself. If you have some flexibility in your job, you may need to do some combination of working from home and taking vacation to get through the full days of having the kids at home all day. The Parks and Rec Department in your town or your child’s school may offer an April Break camp so that your kids can be with other kids for part of the day. If you can’t get time off work, see if the school can provide an aide for your child to participate in these kinds of programs. If not, consider asking for this in next year’s IEP. As an alternative, look for April break camps in your area that cater to kids with special needs.

If You’re in Charge

If you’re the person who will be watching the kids over a staycation, here are some tips.

1. Check the weather.  This is step one so you can be sure that your plans aren’t over before they begin.
2. See if any pals are around so you can plan to do an outing or two with others.  Assuming both you and your spouse are not taking time off at the same time, having another mom or dad around can be very helpful.
3. Don’t make any promises.  You can let your kids know what the plans are for the day in the morning as long as they don’t need lots of lead time to get adjusted to changes.  This way, if plans fall through, they’re not disappointed.

Ideas

• The park
• A hike
• The zoo
• The aquarium
• Movies
• Board games
• Painting
• baking
• Play doh
• Lego sets
• picnics
• Puzzles
• Books
• Bike riding
• Exercise videos
• Toys

More Involved Ideas

• Scavenger hunts
• Road trip for the day to a nearby museum
• Theme Days

Step it up with a Theme!

You can combine any of the activities above into a theme day.  Let’s go through an example just so you get the idea.  If your theme was a Circus Day, here are some ideas:

1. Watch Dumbo.
2. Make popcorn and try cotton candy or circus peanuts (gross).
3. Print out circus-themed coloring pages.
4. Bring out all the animal toys and draw the backdrop of a tent.
5. Make up ‘acrobat’ dance routines.
6. Go on the swings with circus music playing.
7. Bring out the hula hoops!
8. Have hot dogs for lunch.
9. Play circus animal charades (let the kids make the animal sounds or you’ll all be stumped).
10. A Board Game like Balloon Lagoon or Elefun fit well with the circus theme. 
11.  Paint Your own clowns. 
12. Toss around an oversized beach ball.

These are just ideas and they’re only the beginning in terms of how creative you could get.

Pro Tip

Don’t tire yourself out more than the kids.  If you go crazy planning these activities, you’ll put in more than what you get out.  Try to go with activities that take the least amount of work on your part and take lots of energy from the kids.

For a simple theme day we did based on the movie Monsters U, click the link below.