Dr Shona Goodall has been working with Kinder Surprise to explore the best activities for kids over Easter. Shona is a child development psychologist, she has teamed up with Kinder Surprise to illustrate why sparking kids imaginations through imaginative play is so important to their growth and social learning abilities.

Shona is part of the Kinder Collective, which is a panel full of fab people who have come up with some fun suggestions on what games to play, top tips on how to keep your kids entertained and away from those screens!

Shona is a lecturer at the University of Sheffield, a clinical psychologist at Sheffield Childrenโ€™s Hospital NHS Trust and a resident psychologist on Channel 4โ€™s The Secret Life of Four and Five Year Olds.

Shona knows a thing or two about imagination and has worked with our panel to curate The Ultimate Guide to Sparking Imagination which includes six simple tips to help you spark your childrenโ€™s imaginations.

You can download the 6 simple ways on how to spark your child’s imagination, that the Kinder Collective panel have created, as a PDF, which means you can add it onto your phones and take it with you wherever you are. Here are my favourite ideas below:

Finish my story

I love this idea, we do this game a lot, especially when we have to wait for something like a flight. It’s really easy too and the limits are your own imagination. It does work best when the grown ups start the story off, I find, one person starts off the story with a sentence. The next person says the next sentence to the story. You work around the group until you get to the end of the story. Two goes around a group of 4 is usually enough for a good story!

Literally anything goes with this idea, meaning that the children can take the story absolutely anywhere. The last time we played this, we started off the story with a relatively normal beginning… “once upon a time there was a little girl”. Noah was next and he came out with “and she lived in her house with a large blue alien called Bob”. You see how unpredictable this game can be.

The kids love it too – they couldn’t stop giggling. On the second time we played it they tried to be the most creative they could be – they got quite competitive about it.

Chocolate egg Easter hunt

There is nothing more exciting than an egg hunt at Easter time. I love setting them up, just as much as I love seeing the kids smiles when they find an egg. I use Easter egg hunt kits to put clues around the garden, to encourage the children to find the eggs. Daddy and I help with the hot and cold comments.

Create a story

I love the idea of using Kinder Surprise toys as a prompt for a story. The kids would love writing something about their new toys as well. I am definitely going to try this whilst we wait for our flights next week!

What fun things do you do with the children to encourage imaginative play? I would love to know if you are going to try any of these over the Easter weekend.

What do you think?

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