Stay Happy & Healthy
From home schooling and sleeping better to baking banana bread we offer some lockdown advice and inspiration
HOME SCHOOLING
While we are still unsure of when the schools may reopen, parents of young children are finding it difficult to keep-up with home schooling and trying to work out the best way to cope. If your children are at home with you and you’re concerned that they keep up with their school work, education expert and former primary school teacher Becky Cranham of www.planbee.com has some top tips to help kids keep busy, active and learning.
Nurture Nature
Planting seeds and watching them sprout and grow is always rewarding. And you don’t need a garden. Pop some multi-purpose compost in a plant pot, plastic cup or old yogurt pot, sprinkle the seeds in and cover with compost. Encourage your child to take responsibility for making sure the plant has enough water and sunlight and challenge them to record what happens to the seed each day.
Make them an Expert
Are they crazy about LEGO? Challenge them to find out when it was invented, by who and how it became so popular. Do they love singing and dancing? Challenge them to write and perform their own songs, or even create a music video. Crazy about science? Challenge them to put together a demonstration or presentation about their favourite scientist.
Telling a Story
Ask children to pick a main character, a setting and a special object and let their imaginations run riot! To present them to the world too, they could stick with the good old traditional pen and paper or try creating an eBook. Book Creator is a great free app.
Keep Reading
Check out www.getepic.com which has access to 35,000 children’s books, learning videos, quizzes and more. Encourage your child to act out the finished story or create a puppet show.
Model Making
Use playdough or modelling clay to make a model of the solar system or to show the animals and plants in a habitat or food chain. Or use recycled objects, such as boxes, food packaging, bubble wrap, newspaper to make a medieval castle, a spaceship, a dinosaur or a Tudor galleon.
BETTER NIGHTS SLEEP
As many of us are still working from home during this period, our routine and sleep pattern may have changed. Here we list some ideas to ensure you get a good sleep every night.
Get into a Routine
Go to bed and wake up at roughly the same time every day. Help your body get into a sleep rhythm by establishing a bedtime routine that promotes sleep. Take a warm bath, have a light snack or do some reading each night to wind down.
Avoid Blue Light
“Blocking blue light before bed can transform sleep. Blue light from laptops, phones, iPads and TV’s can trick our brain into think that it’s daytime. This can disrupt the brain’s natural sleep-wake cycle leading to a poor night sleep,” advises Leading London Nutritionist Lily Soutter.
www.lilysoutternutrition.com
Create an Atmosphere that Promotes Sleep
Make changes to your bedroom to make it more conducive to sleep. Darken the room as much as possible and keep it quiet and cool. Make sure your bed and pillows are comfortable for you. Perhaps the most important change that can be made to a bedroom is to keep activity out of the bed that shouldn’t be there. Don’t check emails on your phone or computer in bed. Watch television and read books in another room. Help your body prepare for sleep by making the room and bed a place where you only sleep.
Stop Exercising Late
Getting sweaty with exercise is a great way to relieve stress as it releases feel-good chemicals, but it’s important to not exercise too late. “Try to exercise early in the day. Exercise can be extremely stimulating and some women find it difficult to sleep following a late work out session,” Dr. Marilyn Glenville.
Choose the Right Time to Eat
Your body does its best digestion when you’re upright—not curled up in bed. Going to bed with a full stomach makes you seven times more likely to suffer from uncomfortable issues like acid reflux or heartburn that can keep you awake.
HOW BRITS ARE SPENDING TIME IN LOCKDOWN
The internet is awash with people sharing new tricks they’re trying to learn with all the extra time they have on their hands. Trusted data provider www.semrush.com has found the public are searching for skills on Google. The data shows Brits are a nation of gardeners, linguists, bakers, gymnasts as well as the terms most searched for related to lockdown.
Sign Language Gets the Thumbs up from Brits
Since the beginning of lockdown, there has been a significant rise in people searching how to learn a new language. Interestingly, whilst “how to learn French” (6,800 searches) and “how to learn Spanish” (7,910 searches) prove popular, the most searched for was “how to learn sign language” with over 12,290 in March 2020.
Public Go Bananas for Baking
The nation has gone baking mad whilst placed in isolation. SEMrush has looked at the types of recipes searched for online and found that lockdown in March caused an increase of 74% in the total volume of searches for recipes. It seems the public are turning to comfort food more so than healthy food, with searches for “salad recipes” featuring way down in 83rd place. Baking, however, has proved to be the most popular type of cooking, with the top five searched for recipe terms being; “pancake recipe”, “banana bread recipe”, “bread recipe”, “scone recipe”, “flapjack recipe”. With that in mind it seems likely there will be a big spike in people searching for their local dentist once lockdown is over.
Surge in Self-Sufficient Brits Seeking Spuds
Data looking British gardening habits shows a dramatic increase in the numbers of people looking to grow their own fruit and veg during lockdown. The new data shows that in March alone, there were 1,417,000 garden-related searches by shutdown Brits, many of them looking for tips on how to grow your own fruit and vegetables. With online searches for ‘how to grow potatoes’ increasing by 834%, onions at 407% and carrots and tomatoes, both up 406% month on month, it’s obvious to see which larder staples Brits don’t want to face dinner without. Ambitiously – there has also been a dramatic spike in people searching for how to grow their own avocados, up 83%.
Hungry for more?
Read up on the latest news, delicious eats, travel treats and seasonal style trends in FEATURES, or browse a curated selection of our FEATURED PRODUCTS, meander through our guide to the finest things to do in Cheshire and beyond in WHATS ON or partake in our COMPETITIONS.
About The CHESHIRE Magazine
We are the definitive guide to luxury lifestyle in the North West. Latest news, delicious eats, travel treats and seasonal style trends. The Cheshire Magazine is the largest luxury lifestyle title for the North West of England, dropping directly through the letterboxes of VIP subscribers from the Wirral to Greater Manchester plus all the villages and towns in between and digitally available as a subscription in print and digital on issuu.com worldwide. We specialise in connecting luxury brands to likeminded consumers.
If you are interested on how you can partner with The CHESHIRE Magazine, read more about us. Or get in touch to find out more about marketing, featuring or partnering with the Cheshire Magazine in print or online.
