Kids Activities Galore! | S1 E2

Even without COVID, we all welcome ideas for activities to do with our kids during the summer. Anne shares easy projects primarily using household items, and most with minimal preparation. 

Transcript

Not exactly live…but this is Short and Sweet Parenting Tips, Episode 2. Welcome everyone! I don’t know about you, but my magic bag of tricks to entertain my kids has run out of...um, magic.

I also imagine that your creativity for activities with your kids is wearing pretty thin, too. So, I’ve pulled together some fun and creative ideas to spruce up your daily itinerary. Most are relatively easy, and hopefully can work some sillies out of the kiddos, and invigorate the older set with a little energy and fresh air. Especially as the weather warms up and spring comes to an end.

As always, I will include links to these ideas on the Short and Sweet Tips Facebook Page.

Here’s a fun scavenger hunt to do with your little ones. You just need a couple old paper egg cartons – one for each kid who participates. Depending on the age of your kid, you may want to cut the cartons in half. Have them paint the inside of each pocket a different color and let it dry. After it’s dry, take them outside and let them find something that matches each colored section of their egg carton. You can surprise them by waiting to tell them what it’s for until after they paint, or let them know ahead of time. You may want to also limit their paint-color options, keeping in mind what is around your house or wherever you’ll be scavenging. When we did this, Katy used the most flamboyant and varied colors, and ended up not finding a lot to match. Another option though is matching things they see, like birds or cars, that they don’t necessarily have to collect in their carton.

Actually the internet has outdoor and indoor scavenger hunts galore! You just print out the PDF and hand it to your kids.

Geocaching was one of our family’s favorite activities when our girls were younger. We haven’t done them in a while, but Robby and I were just talking about the ease of doing these during COVID…and believe it or not, our teenager piped in and said that she would like to start geocaching again. All you need is a smart phone; and your family can go on outdoor adventures and excursions with a little treasure at the end. Get the geocaching app or go to geocaching.com. That’s G-E-O-C-A-C-H-I-N-G. You can view your area on a map and get the GPS coordinates for the treasure or ‘cache’. Often, they have toys and trinkets in them to trade out, so you may want to bring some used tiny toys to swap out. This is also a great place to funnel Happy Meal toys. The app allows you to pick the level of terrain difficulty and the size of the cache. Often, the bigger the cache, the easier it is to find. If you are nervous about COVID germs on the toys, you may want to stick with small or micro caches that aren’t big enough for toys. The downside is that the toys were a HUGE motivator for the girls. 

One simple project is to paint with bubbles. Mix bubbles in different cups with food coloring and blow the colored bubbles so they pop on a piece of paper. In fact, here’s some other DIY ideas, with details on my Facebook page: homemade chalk paint, dinosaur eggs, and mini-marshmallow shooters.

Another cool idea is to start a Teddy Bear Hunt. This is especially suited for a close-knit neighborhood or one full of kids. Put stuffed animals in your window and encourage families to walk the neighborhood searching for the stuffed animals. I’m looking forward to trying this with my Mom’s Group – even though we are in a rural area and live farther apart.

Now this is such a quirky suggestion, owl pellets. Did any of you dissect these in school? Owls can’t digest hair or bones, so they spit them up, kinda like a hairball. It sounds gross, but kids are seriously intrigued by this! Owl pellets are even available on amazon – don’t worry, they’re fully sanitized. Your kids can use tweezers to pull it apart, find skeleton parts, and put the pieces together to try to identify the rodent the owl ate. This is also a great science lesson.

Here is a Hanovich Family Secret and I’m only sharing it with you because of the extreme circumstances created by the pandemic. Stuck in the Mud is an all-time, across all ages, favorite of our families. It’s hard to say how this morphed into what it is now, probably from one of my normal invention modes: either desperation or necessity. So, stuck in the mud: we take all the cushions off our sofa and love seat and set them on the floor in between the couches. Then everyone brings pillows and blankets, plus any bean bags or stuffed animals they want to mix in. It usually ends up a deep cushy pile of fun. There always needs to be strict rules on whether or not they can bounce on the stripped-down couches, or if they can jump in the pillow-y mass. We have a cushioned ottoman that we would wedge up against the ‘mud’ and let the girls jump off of it into the pillows. Just so you know, this was an incredibly special exception to pretty much every single family rule in our house. We did have a rule that only one person was allowed in the ‘mud’ when there was jumping involved. We’ve watched movies in the mud, read books, rough housed, and occasionally the girls have had sleepovers in the mud. In that case, we will often put down a couple twin mattresses underneath the pile. It seems to be a universal hit, but if you think you might try it, you just have to decide how it might look in your family. Just like most active games, this needs to be monitored, especially based on your kids’ rowdiness factor. I also recognize that for some of you, this mess might go against every fiber of your being…acknowledge it, and then I challenge you to step out of your comfort zone.

Don’t forget those old-school favorites like slip and slide, foursquare, world’s longest hopscotch, pillow fights, and making forts. In addition to water fights with water balloons, hoses or squirt guns, you can get some sudsy water and work together to wash the car.

Do you have a kiddo who likes to take things apart…whether you want them to or not? Sit them down with an old computer, dial telephone, alarm clock – any old electronic will do. Give them a screw driver and pliers and let them have at it. Um, make sure it’s unplugged obviously, and closely supervise this activity. Maybe they want to take it apart and see if they can reassemble it. Maybe they just want to break it down and use the parts for other fun projects, or just toss them. My girls both went through a phase where they had ‘invention’ boxes of random….should I say ‘junk’. I limited it to whatever could fit in the box. If the box got too full or overflowed, they had to clean it back down to what fit.

Ooo, I’m actually getting a new burst of excitement just thinking about all these fun activities. My cabin fever may even be starting to fade.

I am so honored that you joined me for this Short and Sweet Parenting Tip. I hope this poured a good dose of fun into your day or week. Until next time, keep up the positive attitude, because that’s what’s contagious!