Latest news with #HeyDuggee
Scottish Sun
21-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Scottish Sun
Five cheap activities to keep kids occupied this summer hols
Plus save on the Remington Style Essentials gift set SUN SAVERS Five cheap activities to keep kids occupied this summer hols AVOID school holiday boredom by planning ahead now. But before you splash out on expensive activity sets and magazines, try these brilliant DIY alternatives. And keep them stashed away, ready for those inevitable cries of 'I'm bored' . . . DOUGH THIS: Whip up a batch of playdough in minutes with ingredients you might already have in the cupboard. Mix 8 tbsp plain flour, 2 tbsp table salt, 1 tbsp vegetable oil and 60ml of warm water in a bowl until a dough forms. Split into three and add a dash of food colouring to each dough ball and knead. Store in old, clean yoghurt pots or airtight containers. CRAFTY PLAN: Your recycling bin is your best friend. Old cereal boxes can be turned into a canvas to paint, while toilet rolls can become binoculars when taped together and decorated. Head to Poundland for PVA glue, tape and paint sets for £1 if you don't have them already. Keep everything in a storage box, ready for dull days. CLEVER COLOURING: Printable activities are a lifesaver and has an amazing selection of free activity kits and animal colouring-in sheets. Watch as ex-teacher reveals why she quit and doubled her income Hey Duggee super fans can find activity pages at curations/colouring-sheets. It's also worth checking your local library website. MEMORY SAVER: Create your own custom memory game or version of Snap using plain card, £1, The Works. Use a felt tip to draw matching shapes on pairs of cards or you could use stickers you already have at home. Lay the cards face down on the floor and watch as they try to remember where the matching pairs are. GO WILD: Encourage outdoor ad- ventures with a home-made explorer kit stored in a plastic bag, tote or rucksack. Plan a scavenger hunt by writing out a list of things that can be found outdoors, such as ladybirds, soil, spiders etc on paper, which kids can tick off. Also add plain paper and wax crayons for leaf rubbing. Place the paper over a leaf and rub the crayon over the top to see the leaf come to life. All prices on page correct at time of going to press. Deals and offers subject to availability. 7 Before you splash out on expensive activity sets and magazines, try these brilliant DIY alternatives Credit: Getty Deal of the day 7 Save £15 on the Remington Style Essentials gift set TREAT your hair to the Remington Style Essentials gift set with hair dryer and straighteners included. Usually £49.99, now £34.99 with free delivery at SAVE: £15 Cheap treat 7 Save £3 on the Dreambaby Smart-Grip Flexible Caged Fan Credit: ] KEEP little ones cool with the Dreambaby Smart-Grip Flexible Caged Fan, which you can attach to prams. Was £10.99, now £7.99, SAVE: £3 What's new? GET 20 per cent off selected indoor furniture at when you use the code FURN20 at checkout. It means this Chicago dining table, usually £90, is £72. Top swap 7 Decant your essentials into the Rawr Beauty travel bottle set, £7.50 7 Or get the TravelShop travel bottle set for £2.99 at Home Bargains TO save on buying expensive mini travel toiletries, decant your essentials into the Rawr Beauty travel bottle set, £7.50, or get the TravelShop travel bottle set for £2.99 at Home Bargains. SAVE: £4.51 Little helper FOR the second year is running a VAT Burn campaign, covering the 20 per cent VAT cost on selected SPF brands until October, so you can stay protected for less. Shop & save 7 Save £34.99 on this Star Wars 3D Puzzle Millennium Falcon FOR huge savings, head to for the summer sale. This Star Wars 3D Puzzle Millennium Falcon was £49.99, now £15. SAVE: £34.99 Hot right now WALKABOUT bars turn 30 this year – order a Parmi dish and get a free pint on Wednesdays. Book at walkaboutbars. PLAY NOW TO WIN £200 7 Join thousands of readers taking part in The Sun Raffle JOIN thousands of readers taking part in The Sun Raffle. Every month we're giving away £100 to 250 lucky readers - whether you're saving up or just in need of some extra cash, The Sun could have you covered. Every Sun Savers code entered equals one Raffle ticket. The more codes you enter, the more tickets you'll earn and the more chance you will have of winning!
The Sun
21-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Sun
Five cheap activities to keep kids occupied this summer hols
AVOID school holiday boredom by planning ahead now. But before you splash out on expensive activity sets and magazines, try these brilliant DIY alternatives. And keep them stashed away, ready for those inevitable cries of 'I'm bored' . . . DOUGH THIS: Whip up a batch of playdough in minutes with ingredients you might already have in the cupboard. Mix 8 tbsp plain flour, 2 tbsp table salt, 1 tbsp vegetable oil and 60ml of warm water in a bowl until a dough forms. Split into three and add a dash of food colouring to each dough ball and knead. Store in old, clean yoghurt pots or airtight containers. Old cereal boxes can be turned into a canvas to paint, while toilet rolls can become binoculars when taped together and decorated. Head to Poundland for PVA glue, tape and paint sets for £1 if you don't have them already. Keep everything in a storage box, ready for dull days. CLEVER COLOURING: Printable activities are a lifesaver and has an amazing selection of free activity kits and animal colouring-in sheets. Watch as ex-teacher reveals why she quit and doubled her income Hey Duggee super fans can find activity pages at curations/colouring-sheets. It's also worth checking your local library website. MEMORY SAVER: Create your own custom memory game or version of Snap using plain card, £1, The Works. Use a felt tip to draw matching shapes on pairs of cards or you could use stickers you already have at home. Lay the cards face down on the floor and watch as they try to remember where the matching pairs are. GO WILD: Encourage outdoor ad- ventures with a home-made explorer kit stored in a plastic bag, tote or rucksack. Plan a scavenger hunt by writing out a list of things that can be found outdoors, such as ladybirds, soil, spiders etc on paper, which kids can tick off. Also add plain paper and wax crayons for leaf rubbing. Place the paper over a leaf and rub the crayon over the top to see the leaf come to life. All prices on page correct at time of going to press. Deals and offers subject to availability. 7 Deal of the day TREAT your hair to the Remington Style Essentials gift set with hair dryer and straighteners included. Usually £49.99, now £34.99 with free delivery at SAVE: £15 Cheap treat KEEP little ones cool with the Dreambaby Smart-Grip Flexible Caged Fan, which you can attach to prams. Was £10.99, now £7.99, Top swap TO save on buying expensive mini travel toiletries, decant your essentials into the Rawr Beauty travel bottle set, £7.50, or get the TravelShop travel bottle set for £2.99 at Home Bargains. Shop & save FOR huge savings, head to for the summer sale. This Star Wars 3D Puzzle Millennium Falcon was £49.99, now £15. Hot right now WALKABOUT bars turn 30 this year – order a Parmi dish and get a free pint on Wednesdays. Book at walkaboutbars. PLAY NOW TO WIN £200 7 JOIN thousands of readers taking part in The Sun Raffle. Every month we're giving away £100 to 250 lucky readers - whether you're saving up or just in need of some extra cash, The Sun could have you covered. Every Sun Savers code entered equals one Raffle ticket.
The Guardian
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I might annoy you, but my intentions are good': Joe Wicks' alien-filled new exercise class for kids
Joe Wicks is doing some burpees. He is being his usual Joe Wicks self, shouting matey encouragement as his lustrous hair bobs up and down in time. If you watched PE With Joe, his daily lockdown-era YouTube series, it will be familiar. However, there is one important distinction. Wicks is now exercising in a void, surrounded by fuzzy little aliens. Welcome to Activate, his new frontier in getting children moving. 'Obviously, PE With Joe had so much impact, and I'm so proud of that,' Wicks says over Zoom. 'But I had this niggling feeling that I couldn't do this for ever. I can't visit every school because thousands and thousands apply for me to visit every year.' Activate is Wicks' answer to this problem. A collaboration with Studio AKA, which makes the magnificent Hey Duggee, it's a series of five-minute animated workout videos in which he appears as a bright, animated avatar, guiding the viewer through a set of bodyweight exercises. These are no joke; the first episode is a lightly punishing round of squats, star jumps and burpees that would probably reduce a lot of adults to sweaty puddles. Activate is fun, visually beautiful and committed to making kids more active. In other words, it's classic public service broadcasting. Which makes it even more baffling that nobody wanted anything to do with it at first. 'No broadcaster could recognise or identify where it would go in their scheduling,' says Sue Goffe, CEO of Studio AKA. 'We just kept getting turned down by everybody.' 'We tried, man, we really, really tried,' sighs Wicks. 'People loved it, but weren't willing to invest. So we said, 'You know what? We gotta make this happen ourselves.'' 'Joe and [his brother] Nikki are contagious,' says Goffe. 'They are a delightful, formidable duo of energy, compassion and kindness. You can't be unaffected by it, so we had to carry on. Roll forward to where we are now and we could never have imagined we would be here.' Where they are now is on YouTube. A few years ago, this would have been seen as a defeat but, in the past year or so, YouTube has become arguably the most dominant method of content consumption on Earth. Much of its colossal audience comprises kids, so now there's a real sense that Activate is meeting its target audience where it lives. Furthermore, as soon as the first episode was complete, partners started rolling in. Universal Music has lent the series its catalogue – the first episode is soundtracked by Elton John's I'm Still Standing – and now it has partnered with the British government. Wes Streeting, the secretary of state for health and social care, was at the launch this week, and there are pledges to fund and promote the next batch of episodes. I poke Wicks a bit, try to get him to gloat over all the broadcasters that turned him down, but he's having none of it. 'Success for me isn't government backing,' he says. 'The win for me is more kids exercising and doing these at home with their parents, doing them in school.' 'I really think this is going to make a big difference to children's health,' adds Goffe. 'You know, it's a big issue. One in five children are leaving school with obesity. That's a terrible statistic. If we can contribute to making content that makes a difference, that's a win.' It's only natural that Activate will be compared with PE With Joe, and for good reason. That was the moment when Wicks – then a fitness instructor with boundless ambition and infinite enthusiasm for taking his top off – became a national treasure. He is now as synonymous with lockdown as banana bread and hitting saucepans on the doorstep. But PE With Joe had two things Activate doesn't. First, it was just Wicks filming himself in his living room so it was cheap to make. Second, it gave lots of bored people an opportunity to spend some of their day looking at Joe Wicks. Meanwhile, Activate is expensive to produce and shows Wicks as a cartoony animation. This is something the producers wrestled with. 'We were always trying to figure out, well, why is it animated?' says Kristian Andrews, who directed the series with Marcus Armitage. 'Obviously, Joe has a massively successful schools tour where he's engaging with kids, but he is just one person. And we pretty quickly realised when we were having these conversations with various broadcasters that, actually, not everyone knows Joe Wicks. Also he's not, you know, the face of diversity. That was an opportunity to broaden it out by giving him some funny little characters to exercise with.' Plus, like everyone, Wicks isn't getting any younger. 'I love what I do, but there's going to come a time where I probably can't film the high-intensity HiiT workouts any more,' he says. 'This is a scalable way of getting into schools, getting into homes.' But simple immortality isn't enough for Wicks. He has far greater ambitions. 'My dream, my moonshot, is that the education department makes it compulsory that every single day kids in primary schools do an Activate,' he adds. 'That could really lift their mood and their focus – and their grades and their mental health – beyond anything else. I'm going to really push for that.' Even without a government initiative, this would seem likely. Primary teachers are crying out for cheap, quick and easy ways to get children moving. Plenty of schools already do a Daily Mile, where pupils go outside and walk around but, to the uninitiated, this tends to have an air of prison exercise. Something as vibrant and fun as Activate could change all that. Having a five-minute break between subjects to jump up and down at the behest of some irresistibly cute animated Minionesque characters seems a no-brainer. There will be more episodes after this first batch and the nature of how they are produced – they are, in their most essential terms, a series of looping animations – means they will become cheaper to make. This is a good thing, because everyone involved has high hopes for Activate. There are suggestions that, through the Universal partnership, musical acts will want to collaborate in animated form. And, although the current focus is on the UK, there are hopes the idea will translate internationally. But, at its core, Activate will always be a manifestation of one man's desire to change the world five minutes at a time. 'I have a genuine love for it,' Wicks says of his desire to get kids moving. 'You might not love everything I say, or I might piss you off, but my intentions are good – and my intention is to help people. This is the most exciting thing I'm working on. PE With Joe, that moment is gone. I always said I'll never do anything more meaningful than that. But if I can create change in the education system and push to make exercise the number one priority, I think that could be my greatest achievement.' Activate is on YouTube now
Yahoo
15-07-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Joe Wicks Teams Up With Hey Duggee Creators To Get Kids Moving
Five years after getting the nation's children moving during the first Covid-19 lockdown, Joe Wicks is at it again. The fitness guru has today launched a children's series on YouTube designed to help get kids stay active this summer, co-created by Studio AKA (the creators of Hey Duggee). The series, called Activate, features energetic five-minute episodes which combine fun animated characters with upbeat music and encourage children to enjoy short bursts of movement that easily fit into their day. Wicks said: 'Activate is the natural next step in everything I've worked towards over the past decade. From my early YouTube workouts, to 'PE with Joe' during the pandemic, my goal has always been to get children moving and feeling good – physically and mentally.' The Body Coach, who shares four children with his wife Rosie, said the project was inspired by his own childhood, where he discovered movement 'as a way to cope with the challenges of living with parents with drug addiction and mental health issues'. 'Activate is designed to make movement fun and inclusive for every child, with short, high-energy workouts that fit into everyday life – these can be enjoyed in the living room, the garden, in the classroom, or anywhere else,' he added. The first episode is now available on The Body Coach's YouTube channel, with further episodes set to be released weekly over the summer holidays. The government is backing the programme as part of its 10 Year Health Plan. Being physically active is good for physical and mental health and helps relieve pressure on the NHS, preventing an additional £10.5 billion worth of treatment a year. Despite that, inactivity levels remain high for both adults and children, with huge inequalities across the country. Wicks' new series hopes to tackle this issue. Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting said: 'Childhood obesity robs our young people of their future, and inactivity is one of the biggest culprits. That's why it's crucial to start building healthy habits from a young age.' He added: 'This initiative directly supports our focus on giving children the best start in life – a cornerstone of our Plan for Change. By investing in prevention today, we're building a healthier generation for tomorrow.' Watch the first episode on Joe Wicks' YouTube channel. 'There's No Right Or Wrong Way': Joe Swash Is Trying To Figure Out Parenting Just Like You I Was Stuck In A Fitness Rut – Until I Discovered the 'Tripod' Rule I'm A Fitness Expert – These Are The Best Exercises To Do By Age
Daily Mirror
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Robert De Niro, 81, in wild crossover as he takes daughter to meet The Wiggles
Taxi Driver actor Robert De Niro, 81, enjoyed a wholesome trip to see The Wiggles in New York City with his two-year-old daughter, Gia Robert De Niro swapped Hollywood sets for something a little more wholesome as he took his two-year-old daughter Gia to meet The Wiggles. The 81-year-old A-lister, who shares the toddler with martial artist girlfriend Tiffany Chen, 45, took the little one to hang out with the Australian children's group before their show in New York over the weekend. The Wiggles shared a sweet clip of Robert shaking hands with all the cast members, who were dressed in their colourful costumes ready for the show. The Taxi Driver actor looked delighted to be there while adorable Gia played with bubbles and looked at her favourite characters in awe. "It was such a thrill to spend some time with the legendary Robert De Niro and his family before our concert here in New York City," they captioned the post. A few other children and their parents were seen backstage with the cast as they entertained the little ones. Earlier this year, Robert opened up about life as a new dad. While appearing on BBC Radio 2 's Breakfast Show in February, the actor spoke to radio host Scott Mills about his daughter Gia. Robert - known for films like The Godfather Part II (1974) and Taxi Driver (1976) - revealed in the interview that he doesn't watch as many films as he "should". He went on to tease that he watches children's shows with Gia though. Asked what he watches at home, the actor told host Scott: "I don't watch as many movies as I should. I try to watch films especially that I'm told ... I just wanna keep up, but I watch current events if you will, news, stuff like that. "Now I watch with my little girl ... the Wiggles and Ms Rachel." Scott then asked about his knowledge of other kids shows, saying: "Do you know about Bluey?" Robert replied: "No. I'll look up ... I'll look for them." The presenter said: "Please will someone write this down because this might change your life in terms of attention span. Do you know what I'm saying? Bluey and Hey Duggee." Robert responded: "Bluey and Hey Duggee, okay." While discussing the Wiggles and Ms Rachel, he added: "I didn't know of them until I started seeing them and my daughter loves to watch them." He later said about the Wiggles: "They're great. Got lots of energy, they're terrific." In January, Robert told The Times that he's an "early riser" and said about his youngest daughter: "I spend my mornings watching Ms Rachel with her, and I give her her bottle."
