Every New Year, every January comes with a chance to refresh. While the winter months can feel long, dark, and cold, we felt this was a great time to focus on child wellness, focusing on mind and body health through movement and imagination. Hopefully, these ideas and resources can both function as a way to help your family hit refresh or cope with some of the gloom that can creep in through the winter months.
Physical Health through Movement
- Health Powered Kids has an entire library of short 2, 5, and 10 minute videos that can help get kids moving. These are great to use when you wake up, before bed, or as a break in the classroom.
- Healthy Kids, Healthy Futures has a similar list of activities and printable materials to help get kids moving in the classroom that can also be used around the house. In addition, this site has lots of other resources to support healthy kids that are worth a look for early education providers and families alike.
- This list of 15 activities from Rasmussen University is a great, creative way to inspire movement and some of the ideas even incorporate imagination in wonderful ways!
- Last but not least, this article from Healthline discusses How to Inspire a Love of Movement from an Early Age. This is a great article that digs into the importance of encouraging and motivating movement while also providing some ideas!
Mental Health through Imagination
- The Baby Center has an amazing article, How to Raise an Imaginative Child (ages 3 to 4) that provides both a great background about the importance of cultivating imagination and some easy ideas for how to do this from home.
- We love this article because it provides ideas broken down by age ranges so that you can tailor activities throughout the growth and development of your kiddo!
- The foundations of this article on imagination for toddlers has similar ideas both of the articles above but it also provides great links to additional information, ideas, and resources. Some of these include how to let your child lead play, best practices for reading with kids (and some book suggestions), resources for Baby Karaoke, and more!
- Finally, we would be remiss not to include both this article from the YMCA and this article from Healthier Queensland because they provide very tangible, creative, and unique ideas that we love!
If you are looking for a “one-stop shop” with resources to support your child at home, check out this article from Action for Healthy Kids that includes a quick list of ideas for movement, nutrition, and mental health! Additionally, check out these super easy, quick, healthy recipes that support both mind and body health.
These are the kinds of practices that we make sure to bring to the kids and families that work with us at The Family Center/La Familia, both in the classroom and through our family support services. We couldn’t do this work without our wonderful donors, particularly our monthly donors who provide us with reliable funds to build our programs. Learn more about monthly donations here and consider giving what you can!
