Camp indoors Make a den in the living room or bedroom by draping sheets and blankets over the kitchen table and furnishing the inside with cushions and rugs. Add a CD player, some snacks and a torch and ‘camp out’ for a while.

Paint a pebble Look out for nice smooth pebbles that you can transform into grisly eyeballs, spotted ladybirds or flowery paperweights. You need acrylic paints or house paints for this. Make sure everyone is in an old painting shirt first!

Form a band You don’t need to buy instruments to form a home-made band: put dried beans into an empty plastic bottle for shakers and make a drum kit with upturned saucepans, wooden spoons and pan lids.

Make an animal hospital Gather all the soft animals in the house in the ‘surgery’ and have the vet write (or draw) their symptoms, examining them with a toy stethoscope if you have one. Naturally, some poor creature will need treatment.

Do the washing up Put a load of plastic crockery and large utensils like potato mashers and colanders in the washing-up bowl. Place it on the floor, sit your little one next to it on a towel to ‘wash up’ with lots of bubbles.

Draw around each other Dig out an old roll of wallpaper and draw around each other, colouring in faces, hair and clothes. These make great life-size reminders of how fast the children are growing. 

Make sweet faces Decorate digestive biscuits using coloured icing and sweets — you can make some very silly faces.

Try potato printing Cut a potato in half and carve out simple designs – a flower and a house for example. Put some kitchen sponges on foil trays and pour a little paint on each. Then get dipping — you can make excellent potato print wrapping paper like this.

Design a collage Hunt through your store cupboard, garden or park for things with different textures and design a scene. You can use leaves, buttons and dried beans. A great one is a beach scene using sand or gravel as the beach and strips of silver foil for the sea.

Get creative with crayons Cover a piece of paper with every colour crayon except black. Take a black crayon and using it on its side cover all the colours with black. Then, using a matchstick, scratch a picture on the paper to reveal the bright colours underneath.

Become actors “Act out a story with teddies — we always do Goldilocks and the Three Bears with the three bowls of porridge and the three chairs!” 

Anjana, mum of Paresha, 4

Go shopping "Mine love playing shops – it’s usually a corner store with lots of tins of cat food and tea bags. They put prices on everything and use the scales to weigh all the fruit!" 

Kate, mum of Maddie, 4, and Joel, 3