Fun at Home Activities for Young Children
Long stretches of time at home – due to school closures, winter break, and summer break, always leave me looking for new and fun things to do with my kids at home. If you are like me, you’ve probably been pinning ideas like crazy and searching all the ideas on Instagram. I am succumbing to ideas I always “kinda” wanted to do but never really “felt” like doing. Sound familiar?
[pinterest url=”https://coastalbend.momcollective.com/diy-crafts/10-more-activiti…ure-safe-at-home/” image_url=”https://coastalbend.momcollective.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/At-Home-Activities-_-Pinterest.png” count=”horizontal”]
In case you are out of activities for young children, here are a few things we have tried and loved!
1. Forts of all kinds.
Make a blanket fort. A Cardboard fort. A tent in the backyard. A Blanket over the clothesline. Several Amazon boxes taped together. Whatever you and your loves want. There is something absolutely magical about a fort. The amount of imagination inspired by a fort is limitless.
2. Play-doh challenges.
We love play-doh. But sometimes even our imagination is bored of play-doh. So we have started doing play-doh challenges. I do not have a super creative and awesome printable for this. (because I like to inspire Mama’s to be creative too). But some ideas we have done are play-doh self-portraits, garden scenes, favorite foods, shape tracing/creating, etc. I write these out on strips of paper and we draw them out one by one.
3. Flower stamping
You will want WASHABLE paint for this one (just a heads up). I saw this idea over on The Natural Nurturer and just KNEW we needed to try it. We walked around our yard and collected all sorts of things that we could “stamp” with. We grabbed flowers, pine cones, seashells, leaves from our orange tree, and lavender sprigs from our flower garden. Anything that we were curious about, and we were excited to see how it would “stamp”. We stamped our findings into multiple colors on to our manilla paper.
4. Bubbles in the kiddie pool
This is super self-explanatory. But sometimes we need a little nudge from someone else to remember self-explanatory adventures. Fill the kiddie pool with water and bubble bath, and boom way more fun! And the best part? It’s outside so they can SPLASH and jump as much as they want without making a huge mess on your bathroom floor!
5. Cardboard box cars
My kids have talked about this for DAYS following. We turned some Amazon boxes into “cars” and “drove through” our pretend restaurant for play-doh treats and fake ice cream. This activity is two-fold. You get to make and create the cars and then play pretend. So it lasted all day!
6. Inspiring Side Walk Messages
My kids love doing this over and over again. On our neighborhood walk or bike ride, we will write notes of encouragement and love along the sidewalks. We love it when we come across other people’s messages and we like to imagine others seeing ours. (When out on a walk we keep a wide social distance, we stay in our neighborhood, we cross the other side of the street if we see someone coming, and then we wave hello. Don’t forget to wave hello, because social distancing does not mean we are grumpy all the time right?)
7. Charades
My six-year-old is finally old enough to appreciate and love charades. We love doing “Disney Movie Charades”. I am sure somewhere out there there is an app for that. But we just do it the old fashioned way. I get on Disney Plus and scroll through the movies so that I can remember our favorites and I write down like 20 ideas. We all take turns and sometimes we FaceTime in with Grandma and Grandpa that is added fun!
8. Backyard Camp-Out (or living room camp out if you don’t have a yard)
We LOVE camping, and campfires and S’mores and many of our Spring plans were cut short due to the stay at home order. We have improvised by bringing the camping to us. We sleep outside, we set up a tent, we make tin foil dinners, and have S’ mores for dessert. Honestly. You would never know we were just in our back yard. It’s the best.
9. Bring Your Inside Toys Outside
I think desperate times call for desperate measures. I have relaxed several household rules lately. Including which toys belong inside and which ones belong outside. (don’t be mad) Simply because…they feel like new toys when they are outside! We recently took my son’s toy town outside and you would have thought it was brand new again! We all played for hours with it, and it became this week’s favorite toy, for BOTH kids.
10. Bake a treat
Yes, it makes a mess and takes TIME. But isn’t TIME something you need to kill lately? Baking is a great way to make memories, interact and even TEACH. We recently made “Bread in a bag” and it was SO fun! I’ll link the recipe here! (It cuts down on the mess since it’s in a BAG! You’re welcome).
I hope these ideas help you, and if you have some new ones send them our way by tagging us on Social Media!
-Em
[pinterest url=”https://coastalbend.momcollective.com/diy-crafts/10-more-activiti…ure-safe-at-home/” image_url=”https://coastalbend.momcollective.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/At-Home-Activities-_-Pinterest.png” count=”horizontal”]
