How to keep your kids busy and happy on holiday breaks

The holidays are great for spending time with the kids, but over the Thanksgiving break, it can be difficult to keep restless children entertained and out of your hair long enough to take a breath.

But with a little planning, your kids can have some structured fun and stay out of trouble.

For older children, Life Hack has compiled a list of ideas to keep your children busy when they’re on extended school breaks:

• Create a treasure hunt: Find some inexpensive items and hide them in different areas outside, like a garden for instance.
• Shake and Bake: Allow your children to pick a recipe for a food or dessert that they would enjoy, based on the ingredients you have at home. Then the child or children can read from the cook book (if they’re old enough to read) and follow along step-by-step, with an adult on hand to step in for the dangerous or difficult stuff.
• Make a movie: Nowadays, youngsters can work your smartphone better than you, so why not let them make a movie? Allow them to borrow your phone to record a short film. Then they can edit the movie on a program like Windows Moviemaker, share it with the family and potentially find their inner-Spielberg.

Find the complete list of Life Hack’s holiday ideas for kids here: http://bit.ly/MOMyJx

For younger kids, 18 months and up, Parenting.com has some pretty neat suggestions that will keep them engaged.

• Envelope Surprise: Take six envelopes and filled them with different images cut out of magazines, junk mail and other disposable publications.

Hand one envelope at a time to the child, along with a glue stick and a blank piece of paper. For a toddler-aged child, he or she can simply paste each item onto the piece of paper.

For a pre-school aged child, he or she can organize photos of similar items in different envelopes.

Find Parenting.com’s complete list of projects for younger-aged kids here: http://bit.ly/Wpv8Jp