One of my clients complained that her husband had to spend one evening with the kids, while she had to go studying, and that she was very stressed about it. Her husband said he had no idea what to do with them. When she gave him some entertainment suggestions he said, “No, I want to do something with them that will be meaningful”. This made me think that some parents do not understand that for kids, everything can be meaningful if it is in the form of play.
Play reaches the habits most needed for intellectual growth
– Bruno Bettelheim
Tip #1 – The fun incentive
The first tip I have for you is to present everything you do with kids as a game. Over the last 4 years, I have worked with 20,000 students from grades 4 to 12 and the first question we ask the kids in our presentation is, “Would you like to play a game?”. I play games with my university students and the impact of it is magical. Researchers discovered that pre-teen children who called their learning activities “play” were more successful, happier in school and more socially content at the end of adolescence than those who considered their learning activities “work”.
Tip #2 – Motivation is internal
Tip # 3 – Learning requires a state of flow
Kids learn from every experience that is in a state of flow. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book “Flow, The Psychology of Optimal Experience” (1990) said that flow is a state where attention, motivation and the situation interact, resulting in a kind of productive harmony, which means Play is a state of flow that requires just “the right balance” of challenge and opportunity. I always say it must be the right combination of comfort and challenge. If it is too easy, too predictable, too comfortable, if it is boring, if it is too hard, too new, it turns us off and we give it up.
Kids are very attuned to this fine balance. This is why they can watch a movie repeatedly before they suddenly tell you it is too childish. When the balance tips to one side, they seek to balance it.
The success in every educational plan or program is to introduce small challenges that will never, ever tip over the balance.
I hope this list will be great help for parents who are sometimes stuck for ideas.
Fun Activities for Kids
- Blow bubbles
- Blow candles
- Play cotton ball soccer with strews on a dining table.
- Whistle
- Blink with one eye
- Sprout seeds
- Plant seed in the garden patch
- Bounce a ball
- Throw a ball into a ring(or a bucket)
- Throw a ball to a wall and catch it
- Tie shoe laces
- Make a plait from thread, paper, dough
- Make creatures from Plasticine (with younger kids just focus on making simpler things like a sun, a flower, a person)
- Bake a cake
- Decorate your cake. If it is too hard to make icing, buy icing in a tube that only requires squeezing
- Crack an egg
- Play with shaving cream in the shower
- Play with toothpaste on the shower walls
- Teach them to tie a necktie
- Play paper scissors rock
- Play a guessing game (21 questions, 4 clues and 4 attempts to guess)
- Do push ups
- Do sit ups
- Jump rope
- Gallop (pretend to be a horse – “horse around”)
- Ride a bicycle
- Do cartwheels
- Play with a hoola hoop
- Juggle with three balls
- Play hopscotch
- Throw a rubber band as far as you can
- Make your own bow and arrow
- Hit a baseball (or any other ball)
- Hop (on one leg)
- Play with marbles
- Walk on beams (if you don’t have some walk on the sidewalk as a beam)
- Make a mini golf course at home with furniture
- Face painting
- Paint nails (regardless of the gender). If the kids are not allowed at school, you can paint toe nails
- Dive into a pool
- Swim
- Stand up in the pool
- Hold your breath in water for as long as you can
- Go to the library
- Experiment with floating toys in the bath (suggestion: add food colors to the water from time to time to make it more interesting. 1 drop of food coloring will change the color of the water but will not affect the skin)
- Teach them cool ways to fold napkins (Eden and I bought a book in Thailand about origami and it is so much fun)
- Play with a water hose. If you have a sloping lawn, put down a tarp with water and soap to turn it into a water slide
- Teach kids to take photos
- Teach kids to count in another language (and say hello and thank you)
- Play discovery games using the globe. Spin and point to a county. Ask the kids to say which country it is or to name a neighboring country
- Teach them to send a post card to someone and how the post office works
- Fold origami
- Bake bread
- Make a dip (you could even cut up some vegetable sticks and eat it!)
- Eat without using cutlery (use only your fingers)
- Eat in the dark
- Shower in the dark
- Play hide and seek in the house when it is dark (I had hours of entertainments with my siblings doing this. There is so much light coming in from outside)
- Build a bird feeder
- Make a hat from magazines
- Make a collage of things they want to achieve
- Play with finger paint
- Make play dough at home (make sure you keep it in the refrigerator and make it colorful. Add some oil before you put it in a container in the fridge)
- Paint on canvas with acrylic paint (it is not too messy and not very expensive)
- Search for small insects in nature
- Blow on dandelions
- Make a crown out of flowers
- Whistle with a blade of grass
- Invent a family hand shake
- Eat with chopsticks (this is good for the development of fine motor skills)
- Talk in Gibberish for a day, it helps kids notice how much information passes without words
- Use a hammer
- Drill with a real drill
- Cut wood with a saw
- Play a card game
- Teach them to shuffle cards like in Vegas
- Teach them to snap their fingers
- Beat box into a microphone
- Sing karaoke
- Dance as a family to fun upbeat music
- Do Jigsaw puzzles as a family together (if you do it on a piece of cloth, you can always roll it up and put it away for easy storage until the next time you want to continue)
- Tell a joke
- Play family story telling together. One starts a story, after 30 seconds another person continues
- Teach them to do crossword puzzles
- Do word searches
- Solve Sudoku puzzles (with young kids, I take the solutions at the end and erase some of the digits, copy it out and give it to them. Gradually, I erase more and more digits from it)
- Make milkshakes – experiment with different fruits and flavors
- Play spelling games
- Make shadow shapes with flash lights
- Make each other’s silhouettes with a big pieces of paper
- Make your own gifts
- Wrap presents nicely
- Have a thumb war
- Do some hand wrestling
- Make 3D shapes and letters
- Learn a magic trick
- Give a “random act of kindness”
- Watch a movie together
- Make a movie together
- Make a stop-animation movie (take single shots and put them together on video maker)
- Make jewelry together
- Have a computer game competition on two computers when both of you start at the same time
- Make food decorations
- Try chewing 18 times before swallowing your food
- Skip a pebble across the water (try as many skips as possible)
- Search for shapes in the clouds
- Find constellations in the stars during a clear night
- Make sand castles (generally, sand is a very cheap and easy way to teach sculpturing, have fun!)
- Make a campfire
- Build a tent from fabric and thread (using pebbles and nature)
- Tell the time on an analogue clock
- Wash the car together
- Make flower arrangements
- Learn to make different kinds of knots (very useful)
- Play with a yo-yo
- Make up the alphabet by taking photos of each letter from different places you see in your neighborhood. E.g. the sign for the grocery store, street signs, etc. Find different fonts, sizes, shapes and formats and make up an alphabet chart.
- Tie dye a shirt
- Make a water spitting competition
- Build a piggy bank
- Have a BBQ
- Play in the mud (it’s dirty but totally fun)
- Play with flour in the bath tub (no water). It is hilarious and you can always wash it
- Do imaginary interviews. Ask them to imagine being someone and interview him/her. You can pretend to be someone as well and allow your kid to interview you
- Do orienteering and teach them to use a compass
- Play a musical instrument
- Make simple and easy musical instruments
- Teach them to use a sewing machine. Again, regardless of gender, kids can make their own pillows. All my kids had an opportunity to make their own pajamas
- Fly a kite
- Have a pillow fight
- Blow up some balloons
- Make funny noises when taking out the air from a balloon
- Have a water balloon fight
- Play catch with water balloons
- Practice some tongue twisters
- Find acronyms for the names of every member of the family
- Sing songs and pronounce each word using only one vowel (“I like to oot ooples and boonoonoos”)
- Play heads or tails
- Play grocery store
- Play with makeup (again, regardless of gender)
- Play “If I could do anything I wanted, I would…”
- Play “If I had all the money in the world, I would…”
- Make music using glasses filled with water by rubbing a wet finger on the edge of the glass
- Play silence. Who can keep quite the longest
- Go berry picking
- Write a letter to your younger self. Send your younger self support, encouragement and insight to help him/her deal with a challenge in the past
- Make a pasta necklace
- Make decorations with modeling ice
- Play with chalk on the side walk or on the street in a safe place
- Go on a treasure hunt
- Make a bridge out of straws
- Have a small boat competition down the stream of a river (you can make the boats out of paper)
- Play Simon says
- Make a time capsule and hide it somewhere
- Make a sand or salt jar. You can use any sort of powdered paint or powdered food color. Mix it with sand, sugar or salt. This will give it a color. Pour it into bottles. You can even use glue and paper to create other sand/salt/sugar art pieces
- Jump into puddles
- Play bowling in the house
- Paint on rocks
- Press flowers/leaves into the middle of big, heavy books. If you are worried about your book, put a tissue either side of the flower/leaf to protect the paper
- Invent a family secret language
- Have a cleaning/organizing competition. We used to travel a lot and we would often get home after a day/two days/a week trip. Everyone would be totally exhausted and would fall asleep in the car. We used to have a competition with ourselves to check how long it would take us to put everything back in place. The great thing is we got faster and faster at it
- Throw imaginary tea parties
- Play with popcorn. Teach them to make popcorn in the microwave, which is easy and not so risky. Use the popped corn as a ball to throw to a target (or even into your mouth)
- Make paper cutouts (like snowflakes)
- Have a family talent show
- Make a sundial
- Make a gingerbread house
- Make a house made of sweets. This is great fun. Eden had to do this as a project once
- Play “Things I like about myself/my siblings/parents/teachers/friends…”
- Make a wish list for their birthday/New Year (things they would like to achieve in the next year)
- Make a play house
- Make your own comic book
- Make your own pizza on a piece of bread or pita bread
- Play with Lego
- Watch albums together
- Make inspirational writing cards to hang around the hose
- Play recognizing car models while driving
- Make each other laugh (do the family laughter therapy (Laughing for no reason)
- Play ping pong on the dining table (no need for a net)
- Draw sentences on each other’s back and try to recognize it
- Play musical chairs
- Pick a family song
- Play volleyball with a balloon (it helps if you are on your knees so the height differences are not so big)
- Play pass the parcel
- Have an egg & Spoon race
- Make paper-mache art
- Bake marshmallow on top of a candle
- Make slime (you can even make it glow in the dark)
- Make paper planes and have a flying competition
- Melt crayons
- Candle making
There are a lot more activities but I am sure this will give you some ideas. Print out this list, so that next time you are stuck, you will find something to do straight away.
If you are adventurous, let the kids choose 3 things out of the list and you get to pick one. Or you can choose 3 and get them to pick one, this way everyone is happy.
Have fun!
Ronit
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