Stations: How they Saved Our Lives.

Imagine if you will you are the mother of small children, and you want to spend your day hammering on the laundry, or doing some freezer cooking. Unfortunately, you have three children ages ranging from 2 to 6, and you have to find some way to keep them occupied while you work around the house. As they are still small, their attention spans are quite small, but you'd really rather not just stick them in front of a TV.
Or maybe you are the mother of multiple children, some small, and some older, and when school time rolls around you are presented with a problem. How do you teach those older children, and yet have some way to keep those little ones occupied in a way that they aren't getting into trouble?
The answer? Stations! This is a method my family has used since I was young. Stations are for your younger kids, while you are busy with the house or with the older children. I remember being the one doing the stations, the one setting up the stations for the small ones, and the one coming up with new ideas for stations. This is how stations work.

1.Time
Stations are purposefully set up so kids are not doing the same thing for an extended amount of time. At our house stations are usually 15 minutes. That way the small child's attention span is not stretched beyond what they can endure.

2. Diversity
Stations are an activity that introduces lots of diversity. If you have, for instance, 4 stations going at one time, your child could have multiple different types of activities to engage in. One child could be playing with play-do while another is folding dishtowels.

3. Fun!
Stations are activities that your kids generally enjoy. Some common stations at our house are coloring, playing with stuffed animals, puzzles, or toy army men. But you can always throw some pretty interesting stuff in there like a clothes-folding station, playing store, or building ramps for their little hot wheel cars.

4. Limited Supervision
This is the best part of stations. The activities that you have the kids do are ones that you don't have to supervise. So you can have them fold clothes, but you wouldn't have them bake cookies, for example. The only supervision that is really required is setting the stations up in the first place, or possibly helping them move to the next one.

5.Putting it all together.
So how does that actually work? You might ask. Simple. Set up the same amount of stations as you have kids. Say I have 4 little kids to entertain. I would set up 4 different stations in 4 different rooms. One could be puzzles on the kitchen floor, another could be playing with stuffed animals in a bedroom, a third could be coloring at the table, and a fourth could be reading/looking at books on the living room couch.
Then I would place one child in each of these stations, and set a 15 minute timer. For the next 15 minutes, the child has that one activity they can do, and that is all. Then, when the timer goes off, they can move to a new activity, and a new timer is set. In the space of 1 hour, the 4 kids have had a turn to do each of the activities, and they may even be willing to do the whole thing all over again.

So that is Stations 101. It really has been a life saver, and something we use often in our home. And if the child really doesn't like one of the activities, they simply know that they will have to be bored until the timer runs out. This system greatly minimizes both chaos and questions. My siblings often look forward to stations, and will beg my mother to let them do it even when Mom doesn't need them to.
Have you done anything similar to this in the past? How do you entertain your children during school time or the like? What are some fun activities that might work well for this system? I would love to see your comments below!