Activities for kids

I'm realizing that many children (and parents) are feeling a little bit house-bound at this point. With some of us looking at another four weeks of sheltering at home, I thought I would put together of list of things that you can do with your children to help pass the time and fill the days. Twenty-seven years of occupying children might as well be put to good use.

I have done some brain-storming today as I sewed masks (they're not the most interesting or technical things to sew) to see how many different activities I could come up with. Here is my totally stream of consciousness list in no order what so ever. Not all activities will be good for every age, nor will every activity be useful for every family. Hopefully, you'll read through the list and it will trigger your own ideas, too. If that happens, feel free to add them in the comments to help out other families.

Ready? Here we go!

• Make a blanket fort under a table
• Serve lunch
• Make more than one fort and have a whole city
• Camp out underneath them for a night
• Have a household scavenger hunt
• Make s'mores indoors over your stove
• Hide an item around the house and play hot or cold
• Order a chin-up bar and encourage children to learn to do pull-ups
• Have a pull-up contest
• Water play
• Fill the kitchen sink and let toddlers "wash" dishes
• Fill pitchers with water and let children practice pouring
• Look up what a particular day is celebrating. You know, Today is Talk Like a Pirate Day or National Cupcake Day (if there is such a thing... probably). Make a party out of it.
• Use painter's tape and create an indoor hopscotch game. Teach it to your children if they don't know how to play.
• Look up how to play hopscotch from other countries. They're not all the same.
• Use it to teach skip counting and instead of putting 1-10 in the squares , count by 2's or 3's.
• Collapse some cardboard boxes and let your children use them as sleds down the stairs.
• Sew with felt. Felt is a great first hand sewing experience as it doesn't fray or ravel. 
• Set out some old magazines, scissors, glue, and paper and let everyone cut and paste to their heart's content.
• Let everyone practice hammering nails into some lumber. (We let our children start doing this about age 6.)
• Act out different fairy tales (My children have very dear and vivid memories of play Three Little Pigs with their grandmother.)
• Create tableaux. This one needs to be described. Have you seen the challenges from various art museums to recreate a piece of art using what you have around the house? Well, this is a thing that people have done for decades. We did it a couple of time for our history co-op, and it was far more fun than anyone expected.
• Put children in socks, put soap and water on your kitchen floor and let your children "skate" while they clean.
• Create a sensory course around your house with painter's tape. (Google 'sensory course' for lots of ideas.)
• Have a tea time where you dress up and serve tea and fancy snacks
• Make homemade ooblek or slime or salt dough
• Learn a new card game together
• Have a camp out in your living room
• Teach your children to play War if they don't already know
• Up your War game by making your own cards... math problems, Roman numerals, numbers written in a different language...
• Have a fancy dinner together... dress up, use the good china, put more than one fork on the table
• Sing together. Here's your chance to teach all those songs you loved to sing when you were younger, I've Been Workin' on the Railroad, Oh! Susannah!, Found a Peanut, favorite camp songs, Johnny Verbek (a family favorite here) for the edgier families.
• Have in indoor beach day. Put on swimming suits, get out the beach towels, fill the bathtub, put on Hawaiian music, serve fruity drinks, have a hula contest
• Put on a play complete with props, set, and costumes
• Have an afternoon where everyone snuggles in comfy chairs and you listen to as much of an exciting book as you can.
• Create a Bingo game for things your child might see out their window. Have prizes for the first Bingo.
• Create a dollhouse out of all of those Amazon boxes. Put them on their side and line up the open edges, each box is a floor
• Introduce making paper dolls
• Teach your child(ren) a skill you have... knitting, cooking, wood working, embroidery, etc.
• Listen to audio books. 
• If you haven't found Jim Weiss yet, look him up. My children have always enjoyed listening to his story telling.
• Search for old time radio shows and listen to them
• Create a city out of empty cereal boxes. Turn them inside out and paint them to look like buildings. 
• Play outside in the rain and then come in and have a warm bubble bath
• Have an indoor picnic
• Put on music and have a dance party
• Make hand shadows or shadow puppets
• Make your own sock puppets
• Have children wash the car
• Plant an indoor garden
• Let everyone make their own mailbox out of an empty box and start an in house mail service
• Make a geodesic dome out of newspaper (a word of warning, it takes a lot of newspaper!
• Introduce the fine arts. Read a children's book about an artist or a retelling of a Shakespeare play or a story version of an opera or ballet, then look up the actual art or play or opera. Share it in manageable bits and repeat. Familiarity makes things more enjoyable.
• Teach a life skill... laundry, ironing, how to sew on a button, how to fix a toilet, cook a meal, mow the lawn, etc.
• Have a food tasting. But several different brands of the same item and have a blind tasting. Ask each person to taste each item and write notes, then rank them. At the end reveal what each brand was.
• Make-up a story together. One person starts, then it is taken over and added to by the next person, and so on.
• Provide a bin of bean or rice or lentils for sensory play.
• Teach Morse code and then leave secret messages about the house
• Create maps
• Map a room or your house or your neighborhood
• Create maps of imaginary places
• Trace around your child on a large piece of paper and have them draw in themselves
• I just read a mom's idea that she then mailed these to grandparents
• Give each child a straw and put a cotton ball(s) on a table with goal lines on either end. Have them blow the cotton ball across their opponents goal for a point.
• Play charades (it's actually fun)
• Make dandelion jelly
• Learn to make tissue paper flowers
• You could celebrate May Day by leaving them as a surprise for neighbors
• Fill a jar with a tight fitting lid with heavy cream. Let your child shake it until butter forms.
• Candy violets
• Have sit-up or push-up contests
• Play store. This is even better of you have a bunch of coins that can be used.
• Count the pennies in the penny jar
• Make blank books to be filled
• Have a "Pie and Poetry Night". Each person (adults, too) memorizes a poem and recites it, then everyone enjoys lots of pie. This is actually pretty fun.
• Create a family tree with photographs 
• Make Artist Trading Cards
• You could even get friends to join you and then exchange them by mail
• Host your own spa day
• Play jacks or cat's cradle
• Play hide and seek 
• Or, play sardines which is when one person hides and as the other players find them, they hide in the same place until just one person is left searching

It's a start. Feel free to add your own ideas in the comments. Happy playing!