The social distancing rules during the COVID-19 quarantine period posed new challenges in the teaching of physics especially for the laboratory sessions. One solution, that permitted students to carry on the experimental work during this period, was the 'do it at home' activities using simple materials for setting up the experiment and a smartphone as a measuring device. In this line of reasoning an educational intervention was designed and carried out in a junior high school of Athens. After discussing the criteria for selecting the 'do it at home' activities assigned to the students the chosen experiments are presented, and the distance education tools that were used for carrying out the intervention are described. The findings and the conclusions were drawn both by the papers submitted by pupils and from a questionnaire that students answered online a few days after the completion of the whole action. Students enjoyed the experimental work and they managed to carry out quite successfully all the required steps despite a few difficulties they had encountered. It is worth mentioning that such 'do it at home' experiments could also be possibly used at periods when there is a normal access to a school physics lab and not only in the context of a distance learning environment.