Parents, plan such activities for your children. Give them some direction, some stimulus by pointing out the possibilities. Maybe you can tell them the life cycle of a butterfly or an ant. Satisfy your children’s curiosity about Jehovah’s creation. This is an entertaining way of interesting your children in Jehovah God and his earthly creations, teaching them about his purpose for earth and for them as earth’s caretakers. Do as Job 12:7-10 recommends: “Ask, please, the domestic animals, and they will instruct you; also the winged creatures of the heavens, and they will tell you. Or show your concern to the earth, and it will instruct you; and the fishes of the sea will declare it to you.”

Small children delight in making mud pies! Mothers are not too enthused about this, however. But it is simply dirt, and water easily eliminates it. This fun can be turned into a hobby as the child gets a little older. The mud can become clay and the pie can become pottery. This is quite an interesting handicraft, one long practiced with great instinctive skill by different members of the wasp family. (One is even called “the potter wasp.”) Other hobbies could be making macrame hangers for flowerpots, projects in sewing, knitting, cooking, leatherwork involving braiding and embossing, and many others.

Smaller children may find swings to play on, or a sandbox to use. Even empty cartons or a few sticks or blocks of wood become houses or caves, or airplanes or cars, or whatever the children’s active imagination chooses to make them. Many times expensive toys lie idle as children spend all afternoon on a sandpile or playing with a large carton, their imaginations turning these into whatever suits their fancy of the moment. A plastic fire truck costing 20 dollars is always a fire truck. But a big cardboard box—Ah! that can be anything!