AD | Collaborative post
Half-term rolls around, the weather turns, and within about twenty minutes someone has asked for a screen. It’s not a parenting failure, it just happens, especially on the third rainy afternoon in a row when everyone’s patience is thinner than the biscuit tin. The usual answer is a stricter rule about how many hours are allowed, and the usual result is a negotiation nobody wins.
What actually breaks the cycle in our house isn’t a rule, it’s giving everyone something to make. If you turn a photo into a paint by numbers kit, you’ve got an activity that keeps small hands busy for an hour and leaves you with something worth framing afterwards, which is the bit screens never manage. Davincified’s kits use a smart sectioning system that keeps the numbered areas clear and easy to follow. Even a child who’s never picked up a paintbrush properly can finish something they’re genuinely proud of, rather than abandoning it halfway through and asking for the tablet back.
Here are five more that earn their place the same way: low effort to start, and something to show for it afterwards.
Bake something with a story worth retelling
Baking earns its place on this list because it has a built-in ending: you eat it. Pick a recipe with a story attached, such as a grandparent’s shortbread or the birthday cake you always ask for, rather than whatever’s trending, and write the recipe out by hand on a card while you go.
Kids remember the process more than the result, so let them do the messy bits (measuring flour badly included) rather than taking over to speed things up. Keep the card afterwards, tucked in a drawer or pinned somewhere in the kitchen. In five years it’ll matter more than the biscuits did, and it costs nothing beyond the ingredients you already have.
Build a blanket fort and camp indoors for the night
A cosy blanket fort built from dining chairs and patterned throws in a dim living room, lit from inside by a warm lamp, with a torch, picture book and stuffed toy dog outside the entrance
This one needs nothing you don’t already own: a few chairs, every spare blanket in the airing cupboard, and a torch. The actual building takes twenty minutes at most, and the fort doesn’t need to be architecturally sound to work.
The payoff is in what happens after. Reading the same bedtime book by torchlight feels different from reading it on the sofa, and a story told in a dim, cramped space tends to get the full performance rather than the rushed version. Let the fort stay up overnight if you can bear the mess in the living room. A fort that survives until morning gets used twice, and the second night is always the one they ask for again unprompted.
Turn a favourite photo into a keepsake you’ll actually display
Hands painting a partly finished paint by numbers canvas of two children and a dog walking along a beach, with an open tray of small paint pots and a fine brush on a wooden table
Most family photos live on a phone and never get looked at again once the moment’s passed. Picking one, a holiday, a first day at school, the dog looking ridiculous in the rain, and turning it into something you paint together gives it a second life that a camera roll never will. Paint by numbersis a numbered-canvas technique where each printed section corresponds to a specific paint color, so the finished picture comes together section by section without needing any drawing skill to start.
Davincified prints its canvases on wrinkle-free linen that arrives ready to stretch and frame, so the photo you chose ends up on a wall rather than buried a few thousand images deep where it started. It’s a slower project than the others here, expect a few sittings spread over a week or two rather than one sitting, but that’s part of the point: not every family activity needs to be finished by bedtime to count.
Grow something you’ll actually remember to water
A windowsill herb pot or a single tomato plant works better than a whole vegetable patch for this, because the goal is noticing something change over several weeks, not running a smallholding you’ll resent by August. Let the kids pick what goes in, such as a cherry tomato or a pot of basil, and check on it themselves rather than doing it for them.
It’s a quieter kind of keepsake than a canvas or a recipe card, nothing to hang on a wall, but watching something you planted actually grow teaches a kind of patience that very little else manages at that age. A cheap plant marker with the sowing date written on gives them something to check off as it grows, which turns watering from a chore into an actual reason to go outside.
There’s a simple reason this sort of activity earns its place on a list like this. WHO’s guidelines on physical activity, sedentary behaviour and sleep specifically flag limiting screen-based sedentary time for children under 5, precisely because so much of an ordinary day already happens sitting still. Active play is any activity, digging, carrying a watering can, crouching down to check on a seedling, that gets a child moving rather than sitting, and it’s a category worth reaching for before reaching for a screen.
Write letters to your future selves
Buy a cheap envelope each and write a letter to open in exactly a year: favourite toy, funniest thing that happened this month, what you want to be when you grow up. Seal it, and put the pile somewhere you won’t forget about it (a kitchen drawer works better than a desk you’ll clear out).
This one costs nothing and takes fifteen minutes, but it’s the activity our own kids ask to redo every year without being reminded, because opening last year’s letter is genuinely funny by the time it comes back round. Nobody remembers what they wrote, which is exactly why it works.
At a glance
| Activity | Time needed | What you’re left with |
|---|---|---|
| Bake something with a story | 30-45 minutes | A recipe card worth keeping |
| Blanket fort | 20 minutes to build | A bedtime story told differently, maybe two nights running |
| Photo keepsake canvas | A few sittings over 1-2 weeks | Something to hang on the wall |
| Grow something | A few minutes a day, over weeks | A lesson in patience, and maybe a tomato |
| Letters to your future selves | 15 minutes | A laugh in exactly a year |
Why the unplugged hour is worth carving out
None of this is an argument against screens generally, most families need them and that’s fine on an ordinary Tuesday. But it’s worth knowing the scale of it: Ofcom’s most recent Children and Parents media use report found the average UK child aged 8 to 14 spends nearly three hours online every day.
An hour spent on something with a start and a finish, a cake, a letter, a canvas, isn’t going to undo that on its own, and it isn’t meant to. But it’s an hour that isn’t added to the total, and unlike most of what fills a screen, it’s one your kids will actually remember doing years from now.
None of these need a special occasion or a spare Saturday set aside. Pick whichever one fits the weather this weekend, and see which one your family actually asks to do again.
