72 days at home: a December holiday plan for Nairobi kids

Count the days with me. Schools closed on Friday 23 October. Term 1 opens on Monday 4 January 2027. Your child has 72 days at home.

Take away Christmas, Boxing Day, New Year’s Day and a week upcountry with family, and you still have around eight weeks of ordinary weekdays. Around forty of them. In most Nairobi homes both parents work through most of them.

“Let them rest”

Many parents start the holiday with a good instinct. The term was long, the child is tired, the holiday is for rest.

Rest is real and children need it. The first week of a holiday should feel like one.

The trouble arrives in week three. A long stretch with nothing planned rarely turns into rest. It turns into the default activity in the house, and in most houses the default is a screen. Researchers who studied Nairobi children aged 9 to 11 found 74 percent of them passed two hours of recreational screen time on weekend days. A holiday is a long run of weekend days.

By mid-November you know the signs. The child who was tired in October is now bored, restless at night and short-tempered by four in the afternoon. The house has more arguments about the TV remote than about anything else.

Unplanned days drift toward whatever is easiest, and in most homes the screen is easiest.

A shape for each week

You don’t need a timetable for every hour. A child needs a shape to the day, something to look forward to, and one thing they work on long enough to get good at it.

Try this shape for a normal weekday.

The morning slot does the most work. Pick one project for the week and keep it.

Ideas for the morning slot

Free, or nearly free:

• A Scratch game. Scratch runs free in the browser. Aim for one finished game by Friday: a character, a score and a game-over screen.
• Chess puzzles on Lichess, which is free with no adverts. Ten puzzles each morning, then one real game against you.
• A family cookbook. Your child interviews a grandparent on the phone about three recipes, writes them up and cooks one on Saturday.
• A budget challenge. Give a fixed amount for one family meal and the market. Your child plans, buys and keeps the receipts.
• A reading list of six books, swapped with a cousin or neighbour halfway through.

Paid options, if the budget allows: a swimming course, music lessons, a sports academy, or a structured coding and chess camp. Each one buys you a teacher and a routine your child sticks to because someone else expects them.

Hand your child the pen

Most holiday plans skip this part. Sit with your child on Sunday evening with a sheet of paper and draw the week together. Mornings, midday, afternoons, evenings. Let them choose the morning project and write it in.

Planning a week is a skill. Children who plan their own days learn to guess how long things take, notice when they guessed wrong, and adjust. Adults with this skill run businesses and households. Most of us learned it late.

Check the plan on Wednesday. Ask what is going to plan and what isn’t. Don’t fix it for them.

Check the dates yourself

The term dates come from the Ministry of Education calendar. Confirm with your child’s school, since some private and international schools follow their own calendar. The screen time figure comes from a Nairobi study with data gathered over ten years ago, before short-video apps, so treat it as a floor.

In January your child goes back with something to show for the holiday: a game, a stack of solved puzzles, a cookbook, a receipt book. Ask them on 4 January what they’re proudest of. The answer tells you if the plan worked.