A fortnight of purposeful, joyful play that keeps screens off and imaginations fully switched on.
The single most reassuring thing research can tell you about two screen-free weeks with a four or five year old is this: children of this age do not need entertainment delivered to them. They need time, a handful of open-ended objects and a grown-up who occasionally sits close enough to show interest. That is genuinely enough. The developmental payoff, in language, in self-regulation, in creativity and in the simple pleasure of moving a body through space, is substantial and well-evidenced. This planner gives you a day-by-day framework for the Easter fortnight, grounded in what child development researchers actually say, and honest about the wobbles along the way.
If you want the short answer for a difficult afternoon: rotate two or three classic toys or games into view, go outside for at least twenty minutes even in drizzle, and give your child a real task alongside you. Boredom will dissolve. The longer answer, with all the scaffolding you need, follows below.
Four and five year olds are in a critical window for language acquisition, executive function and what neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp identified as the PLAY system: a deeply wired, mammalian drive towards joyful, self-directed physical play. Screens, even high-quality ones, tend to compress this window rather than expand it. Paediatric researcher Dimitri Christakis has shown that fast-paced media can lower attentional capacity in young children, while Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff have consistently demonstrated that hands-on, child-directed play produces richer vocabulary and more flexible thinking than passive viewing.
What the evidence says
The World Health Organization recommends no more than one hour of sedentary screen time per day for children aged three to four, and emphasises that time spent in active play is not merely preferable but essential for healthy physical and cognitive development at this age.
None of this is cause for guilt about past screen use. It is simply good news: two weeks of rich, varied, screen-free play will give your child's developing brain exactly what it is hungry for.
Preparation takes perhaps one hour. Gather your materials before the holiday begins: puzzles, building blocks, a ball, art supplies, any classic games you own, and a few items from the natural world such as pine cones or seed pods stored in a basket. Lev Vygotsky's concept of the Zone of Proximal Development reminds us that children stretch furthest when a challenge is just slightly beyond their current reach, with a knowledgeable companion nearby. You do not need to teach or perform. You need to be present and mildly interested.
Write a loose rhythm, not a rigid timetable. Something like: active morning, creative mid-morning, lunch, quiet rest or reading, outdoor or game time in the afternoon. Pin it to the fridge. Let your child see it. Predictability reduces the number of times they will ask what is happening next, which in turn reduces the number of times screens feel like the easiest answer.
Monday. Begin with a jigsaw puzzle at the kitchen table. At four to five, a thirty-five to sixty piece puzzle is appropriately challenging. Sit alongside rather than solving it for them. In the afternoon, introduce a simple traditional game: skittles indoors using rolled-up socks as balls, or a wooden stacking game.
Tuesday. A baking morning. Measuring, pouring and stirring are fine motor activities that also build early numeracy. After lunch, set out a small world with toy animals or figures, then step back entirely and observe.
Wednesday. Rainy-day art: collage with torn paper, leaves and whatever is in the recycling bin. In the afternoon, introduce a classic board game suited to the age. Simple matching or memory games work beautifully and model turn-taking.
Thursday. Build a den using blankets and chairs. Stock it with books, soft toys and a torch. Leave your child to inhabit it. This kind of imaginative, self-directed play is precisely what Peter Gray identifies as the engine of creativity and emotional resilience.
Friday. A treasure hunt indoors: hide ten small objects and draw a simple map. This builds spatial reasoning and early literacy. End the week with a family game together after supper.
Weekend. Lower the structure intentionally. Free play with minimal adult direction is not laziness. It is the point. Ellen Sandseter and Sergio Pellis both note that children regulate their own emotional and physical limits most effectively when given genuine freedom.
If the weather is kind, let the second week lean outdoors. Nature exposure, as Richard Louv has argued at length, reduces stress hormones, sharpens attention and gives children the kind of multi-sensory stimulation that screens approximate but cannot replicate.
Monday. An Easter nature hunt: look for signs of spring, catkins, ant trails, earthworms, new leaves. Give your child a small notebook to draw findings rather than photograph them. In the afternoon, set up skittles in the garden or on a path.
Tuesday. Garden obstacle course using whatever is to hand: a plank to balance on, a hoop to jump through, a target to throw a beanbag at. Physical challenge and spatial problem-solving in one.
Wednesday. Seed planting. A four-year-old who plants a sunflower and is given daily responsibility for watering it is learning patience, causality and pride in a way no app can replicate.
Thursday. Return to a favourite indoor game from week one, this time letting your child teach the rules to another family member or a soft toy. Teaching consolidates understanding far more deeply than playing alone.
Friday. A small Easter celebration: a homemade egg hunt, a shared meal, a family game. Let the children feel the occasion without a screen in sight.
Browse Jaques London's outdoor games, designed for children from the earliest years and built to last a generation.A wooden toy makes no demands. It does not flash, reward or instruct. It simply waits, and in waiting it hands the narrative entirely to the child. Researcher Carly Dauch has found that fewer, simpler toys produce longer, more focused and more creative play episodes than large quantities of complex ones. A set of wooden skittles can be a bowling alley, a forest of trees, a city of giants or a counting lesson. A classic family game builds vocabulary, emotional regulation and the capacity to lose gracefully, which is a skill that will serve your child for a lifetime.
The open-ended advantage
Adele Diamond's work on executive function in early childhood consistently links self-directed play with physical objects to stronger working memory and cognitive flexibility, both of which are better predictors of school readiness than academic drilling.
Jaques London has been making precisely these kinds of objects since 1795. The company invented croquet in 1851 and created the Staunton chess set in 1849: objects designed for serious, sustained engagement across generations. That same philosophy, that play deserves beautiful, durable, honest tools, runs through every product in the range today.
Explore Jaques London's wooden toy collection, made to be handed down, not thrown away.There will be a morning, possibly several, when your child asks for a screen with the energy of a small barrister. The most effective response is not a lecture but a redirect: "Yes, I know you'd like that. We're going to do this first." Then produce something novel: a new puzzle, a ball of clay, an invitation to help with a real task. Novelty is a more powerful attentional hook than familiarity, and young children are far more susceptible to it than they let on.
On genuinely low-energy days, audiobooks and spoken stories are a warm, screen-free alternative that still supports language development. Dana Suskind's research on the importance of language-rich environments underlines that spoken narrative, stories, conversation and song build the neural architecture for reading just as effectively as, and sometimes more than, visual media.
Two weeks of screen-free play will shift your child's habits more than you might expect, provided you consolidate the gains afterwards. Keep one classic game accessible and visible, not stored away in a cupboard. Maintain the loose daily rhythm you established over the fortnight. And trust that boredom, when it arrives on an ordinary Tuesday in May, is not a problem to be solved. It is, as Piaget and Montessori both observed in different registers, the beginning of every good idea a child has ever had.
Almost certainly nothing. Ten minutes of sustained attention is developmentally normal for many children at this age, and the research of Jeffrey Trawick-Smith suggests that play episode length increases naturally when adults step back rather than hovering or prompting. The solution is usually not a better activity but a quieter adult presence. Sit nearby, do your own thing, and resist the urge to suggest what comes next. Most children, given a moment of genuine boredom with nobody rushing to fill it, will find their own way in within minutes.
The World Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics both recommend a maximum of one hour of high-quality, co-viewed screen content per day for children aged two to five. A few extra hours over a holiday are unlikely to cause lasting harm, but the more important question is what those hours displace. If they replace active outdoor play, physical games or conversation, the opportunity cost is real. The goal of this planner is not perfection or guilt: it is to show that the alternative to screens is genuinely enjoyable, for children and adults alike.
Yes, and they are often more satisfying because the child controls them. Spinning tops, marbles, brightly coloured wooden puzzles, water play with food colouring, bubble-blowing in sunlight: all of these offer rich visual stimulation with the added benefit that the child's own hand produces the effect. Patricia Kuhl's research on active versus passive learning shows that children attend and learn far more deeply when they are the agent of an experience rather than its audience. Movement, colour and surprise are all available without a power socket.
Absolutely. A park, a pavement, a communal courtyard or even a long corridor will serve perfectly well. Skittles can be set up anywhere with a flat surface. A ball, a beanbag and a chalked hopscotch grid need nothing more than a short walk to a nearby open space. Brussoni and Dodd's research on urban outdoor play confirms that the benefits of outdoor activity are tied to the quality and freedom of the experience, not the size of the space. What matters is being outside, moving freely and using the body with intention. Easter in Britain can be brisk, but it is rarely impassable.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.