naturetech wrote: ↑Fri Sep 18, 2020 11:49 amAll education experts, pediatricians recommend 'Tablet/TV' time but not sure how to do that during 'COVID' times with working from home.
Do you mean recommend
limiting media time? I don't think I've seen a recommendation to specifically include media time in their routine.
https://www.healthychildren.org/English ... -Time.aspx
https://www.apa.org/pi/families/resourc ... -childhood
I don't get the sense they have a lot of concern about modestly exceeding these "less than" recommendations, but they certainly seem like good goals. Eg - recommendation is less than 1 hour of screen time for 2-5 year olds, but your pediatrician might not give a stern warning unless it's regularly over 2-3 hours. If I have an important, long meeting, for example, they may get to watch a full movie to help keep them calm.
The activities you describe all seem good. We do a lot of reading with our kids, both typical children's stories and age-appropriate learning books - our boys really like topics like "How do trains work" and "All about penguins". Some of them are inane ("Trucks have wheels"), but still engaging to them. We try to keep track of the better ones. We can check half a dozen or more books out from the library, rotate through reading 3-4 of them a day for a week, and they will spend additional time on their own voluntarily looking at the pictures or even trying to recite what they heard us read. A couple months later, we can repeat many of the exact same books, and they're still engaged by them. We decided to try longer stories with our older kid, and started with the Little House series at age 4. He understood a lot of it, and seemed to simply enjoy sitting and listening to Mom or Dad for moderate periods of time.
Toys are often simple. They go through phases of asking to keep cardboard boxes to use as play houses, or to organize favorite toys in, and they'll find novel uses alone or in combination with other toys for "garbage" like tubes from paper towel rolls. These phases pass, and we throw away/recycle those items until the interest strikes again. Legos, crayons, play dough, and a wooden train set are also staples in our house. We have a couple simple activity books with lots of tear-out pages for coloring, tracing lines, cutting out shapes, counting, doing color recognition, or for the older kid, doing letter and number recognition or tracing.
Sometimes they settle down to play semi-peacefully better if we play an audio book.
We also involve them in chores. Our younger child has reached the point where he can follow directions to only hand us certain dishes when unloading the dishwasher, for example, so he's not handling glasses or knives, and he can feed the dog if we premeasure the food. They're getting decent at getting all of the gasoline into the lawn mower, too (just kidding). We have not succeeded so far in getting cleaning up to become a game they will do on their own, unfortunately. Singing a song worked for Mary Poppins, but not for us.
They carry tools or parts for me or play at doing the same tasks with their own kids tools while I work on the house or car. A small tape measure and a low output flashlight have probably been the two tool purchases that have most helped my productivity since having kids, because then they are less likely to try to demand the tools I'm using.
We try to do lots of walks, and one weekends when we have enough time, hikes. As long as we are in no hurry, have snacks to keep their blood sugar up, and are prepared to carry them if they get genuinely tired, we've done up to 5 miles with a 2-1/2 year old walking over 80% of it.
Lately, we've started doing occasional video calls with grandparents or cousins to ensure they are getting to know their extended family in the absence of visits.
I know not many of these are things that keep them occupied while doing working from home, but the more variety they have when the parent can be engaged, the better it seems they are at staying occupied when the parent can not be engaged. This is another thing books are good for, as they can inspire play that mimics the story, so spending 15 minutes reading a book about cars might inspire half an hour of playing with cars (although nothing is guaranteed with children's behavior).
. But, that's pretty far back.