These are my ideas so far, posted day by day on Facebook since March 19th, and collected here in backwards chronological order (the order doesn't matter).
Invent a Secret Code
Sometimes teachers get insights from the children they teach.
My favourite class (somewhere in Wales) was a class of 11-year-olds learning French for the first time. Two of the boys lingered after one of my lessons to tell me, all excited, that they were now using French as their secret code. In other words, they were having fun with the language (even if their French at that stage was all wrong, as I'm sure it was).
How about suggesting that your children stuck at home use a foreign language as a code for transmitting secret messages to one another or to their online friends, or that they invent their own secret code?
Conduct a recording of orchestral music
Zubin Mehta's 18-month-old grandson has been delightfully doing this at home, moving his whole body to the music while watching and hearing one of Mehta's symphony orchestra concerts.
Hula hoops
(April 6) we watched a video clip of our 6-year-old grandson in Australia playing with a Hula hoop on the patio. Wikipedia tells me that Hula hoops were first invented in 1958; I remember them well. There's a physical exercise idea for any child that can get hold of one.
Garden on a tray
When my sister and I were little girls, we used to make miniature gardens on a tray.
Give the garden a base of soil or damp sand or florist's foam. Moss, if you can find it, makes a realistic lawn, tiny pebbles make paths or stepping stones. (We sometimes had a mirror for a pond. Twigs became trees.) If you add tiny flowers to represent large flowers, give their stems a source of water so that they'll last longer. Take a photo of this transient work of art, so that you'll remember it.
Astronomy
Choose a clear night for some star gazing.
I got rhythm!
OK, musical children, how many rhythms can you come up with? Tap them out on a (homemade?) percussion instrument.
If parents don't feel like joining in, because you're trying to get some work done, tell the children to try this elsewhere in the house, or in the garden.
Make a maze
Build a maze out of Lego.
Writing practice
Within a time limit, perhaps each member of your family could write a list of good things that he or she has noticed since the day they were forced to stay at home. (I'm not a psychologist, but I have a hunch that compiling a list of the bad things would be less advisable.) The person with the longest list gets a reward, even if it's just a hug.
If you would like to expand this exercise, your list-makers should explain why those were good things, either in writing or spoken words. Children who can't yet write very well could dictate their lists to an older person, observing how that person writes down what they say. It might be best not to correct every spelling mistake that's made, but the lists could be printed out later --- with all the words correctly spelled, this time --- and then displayed on the back of a door or a wall, so that wrong spellings are not reinforced.
My husband thinks that older ones could try to do this exercise in a foreign language.
Family timeline
This one requires a little adult participation. To give children a sense of history, find or construct a long piece of paper and have them draw a timeline on it, marking the important dates in your family's story. Depending on the children's ages, this could be as simple or as complicated as you wish. Illustrate the line with their drawings, or affix printed photos.
Draw floor plans
This mathematical home-schooling tip is inspired by my youngest grandson who told us the other day that he likes measuring, and by memories of my aunt and uncle who designed their own cottage, in Teesdale (England).
Give the children tape measures and get them measuring things, so as to draw floor plans of a room, or rooms, in your house. Encourage older kids to draw their plans as accurately as possible to scale, then calculate the areas of floor space. If you'd rather have them doing this sort of thing outside the house, get them to record the dimensions of your garden or back yard. Or have them design an imaginary living space, showing the exact measurements on their floor plans.
Travel round the world
This is a geographical exercise or fantasy best carried out using Google Maps, these days, although when I was young I used to fantasize by means of a school atlas, often instead of doing the homework I was meant to be doing. Encourage your teenagers to plan a journey round the world, using whatever means of transport they like, other than planes.
Knitting
I'm posting this with some trepidation because some kids I know (mentioning no names) might think that knitting needles would make good weapons.
How about learning to knit? It could be a useful skill to acquire.
Keep it simple, teach them to knit just squares, to start with. If the young parents out there either think this is a stupid idea, or don't have any knitting needles in the house, French Knitting might be a good, alternative way of keeping your children quiet and productive.
Playing hotels
When my sister and I were children we used to love "playing hotels" ... at home. We found that setting the table in an abnormally posh way, providing menus and pretending to be waitresses was great fun. If this game appeals, you could take it further by numbering or labelling your bedrooms and bathrooms, dressing up in uniform and so on.
A variation would be playing at restaurants or cafés. Once, when my parents baby-sat their grandchildren, they spent a whole weekend pretending to be at a boarding school. Young children could set up a restaurant for their dolls or soft toys. Older children could prepare any food and drinks to be served and / or treat this as a role-play exercise, providing menus and taking orders in a foreign language.
This morning I saw photos in a Facebook post of a family who had done something just like this last weekend. Try it yourselves?
Send a work of art to someone
A picture of a lion, displayed at her care home, was one of the last things that delighted Mum (then aged 98) before she lost most of her sight and other faculties. It had been painted by a child from a nearby school to be displayed on the wall of the communal dining room. My mother took me to see the picture multiple times, telling me that in her opinion it was the artist's self-portrait and that she'd very much like to meet him!
If you know someone who might be feeling lonely or depressed just now (if doesn't necessarily have to be someone very old), they might well appreciate receiving a young artist's picture like this, with bright colour painted right to the edges and corners of the paper. Write a friendly covering note, make sure the picture is signed and dated, mount it, put it in a big envelope and post it (if still possible), or take it round to their door.
Make a relief map
One of the most enjoyable pieces of homework I ever did (years and years ago) was to make a papier maché relief map of South America, about poster sized but horizontal, with a thick cardboard base. I painted the mountains, rainforests, rivers, surrounding ocean, etc. I can still picture it now!
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