How To - Comping With Kids

Hello again compers!  How is your week going, any nice wins to report?  Still going through the dry spell here, nothing new to report!  We were away for the Bank Holiday weekend, so I have not been comping much really since last week.  I have spent the start of this week getting the house, laundry pile and work schedule back up to speed.  The month is coming to an end now though, and I find that wins tend to come in right at the end or right at the start of the month, so am hopeful that things may start trickling in any day now! 

If you have little ones or grandchildren is it half term where you are?  We have our girls home this week, and have spent the first part of the holiday visiting relatives on the Mainland.  Now we are home we have some local English Heritage attractions to attend pencilled into the diary as we are English Heritage members.  I also have some cinema and bowling ticket wins stashed away for when the weather gets less sunny.  I do love having the children home for the week; it just makes it more difficult to juggle everything else around them.  The rewards are definitely worth the efforts though, as we do have some lovely family times spent together during the holidays.

One way to incorporate the children into your regular routine during the holidays is to get them involved in your comping!  Children love entering competitions too; mine certainly do!  So here is my guide on how to get them comping this half term:

• First Stop Compers News:  Your first port of call for great competitions for the little ones should always be Compers News.  Every month we have a whole section dedicated to Komping Kids, so have a browse through the current selection and make a list of those that your kiddies or grandchildren might want to have a go at.
• Keep it Local:  Local libraries, social media pages and newspapers and magazines are a great source of kids competitions.  Every time a half term or holiday comes round you can guarantee a whole host of colouring, crafting and story writing competitions – lots of which will be run in your local area by the local businesses you use every day.  Follow local attractions and restaurants etc on social media, and put their posts on “get notifications”, so you are informed every time they run a competition.
• Keep your eyes peeled when you are out and about:  When you are visiting local attractions or summer fairs etc make sure you have a good look around for any competitions that are being run on the day.  For example during Cowes Week every year there are great competitions to enter – there was a great one to win a trip to Abu Dhabi last year, which required entrants to estimate the answer to a qualifying competition – great fun to try and work out!
• Get online with the kids:  Lots of the best kids websites run regular competitions too, which is a great activity for when the weather is less picturesque.  Try NatGeo Kids, Tiny Pop, Nick Jnr, Disney and My Sparkle World as a starting point, and bookmark the sites so you can visit them regularly.
• Get Snap Happy:  Digital camera are pretty inexpensive these days, and even the children’s specific ones like those made by VTech and LeapFrog are a pretty cheap source of digital technology fun for little ones.  Encourage them to take their camera out with them when you go on day trips, so whenever they spot an interesting subject they can snap away.  Digital cameras mean we don’t end up wasting lots of money on developing these days either – years ago when we developed kids’ camera film we ended up with 90% of the pictures being dark, blurred or with a random body part across the lens.  Now your little ones can snap away to their hearts desire, and you can keep only those images that make the grade.  Save any that you think will be good photo comp entries to a separate folder on your PC.
• Put pen to paper:  Does your little one have a way with words?  Why not get them to practise their story-writing and poem-writing skills when they are next in need of a creative activity to pass the time.  There are always lots of great short story and poem writing comps for kids, and they may want to practise their skills before entering a fully-blown competition.  It is great for the literacy and vocabulary skills too, so win:win!
• Treat them to a magazine:  It seems to me that all children’s magazine and comic these days have competitions and puzzles in them.  If you purchase your child a magazine as a treat say once a month or so, make sure to get them to scour it for competition entries too.  Sometimes these will be straightforward postal entry, email entry or even require them to solve a puzzle or crossword.  What a great sense of accomplishment your child will feel if they complete the puzzle and end up winning a prize for their efforts!  If you buy certain magazines regularly why not also check out the Magazine Exchange that takes place over on the Chatterbox Forum for details of whether your child’s magazine might be eligible to join in too.

So why not have a go at some comps with the kids this half term – what a fab, productive and possibly prize-winning way to spend some time while they are off school!

Happy comping with the kids and lots of Lucky Dust to you all!

Kirsty x