10 Fun Family Activities Your Kids Will Love
By: Josh Raimonde
Tags: Activities For Kids, Kids, Family, Family Fun, Home

10 Fun Family Activities Your Kids Will Love

…and you will too if you embrace your inner child

Photo by Artem Kniaz on Unsplash

Vaccines started rolling out this week, and the end of the pandemic is finally in sight. However, the general public still has a few more months left of being mostly relegated to their homes.

Everyone is getting restless, but what better time to try out something different at home with your family? If you’ve run out of ideas to keep everyone going through this home stretch, here are some things you could try.

Play board games

There are a plethora of amazing games waiting to be discovered — both classics and more modern games. We love Yahtzee and Scrabble, although we don’t follow the rules to a T.

I’ve even been having fun playing my kindergartner in Candyland and Chutes and Ladders. If the classics and kid’s games are not your style, try a great new-school game like Patchwork or Santorini.

Play an instrument

I have an acoustic guitar hanging up on the wall in our living room. I’m not the best, but I love playing.

Maybe it’s been a while since you’ve played piano or guitar? What better time to get back in the groove or learn to play for the first time? Music can be relaxing and playing an instrument is a great stress reliever.

Make up a game

We love making up random games with whatever we can find lying around. You’d be surprised how competitive it got when we tried rolling a marble across the room into a Tim Horton’s coffee lid.

Think of the simple games you used to play in school when you were a kid.

There’s the folded up paper football game where you try to biff it through the field goal posts (a.k.a. someone else’s hands).

There’s the game with three quarters where each time you have to shoot one through the other two as you progress down the table and try and score on your opponent — once again through a field goal post of sorts made with someone's pointer and pinky laid out on the table.

Heck, you could even play Mum-ball or Seven-up if you have a large enough household.

Go for a ride to look at Christmas lights

Am I the only one who does this?

My dad used to take us for a ride once a year to look at the lights in December, but we’ve already been out at least a half-dozen times to look at houses since we drove around for Halloween too.

Your kids will love this if you’ve never done it before. We like to go through subdivisions as we can take it slow there, and the newer ones are often times chocked full of wannabe Clark Griswolds.

Karaoke

Did you know that you have a karaoke machine? It’s called YouTube and it’s got way more songs to choose from than the guy you used to see with your friends at your local watering hole.

Don’t be shy and “Don’t Stop Believing.”

Where else are you going to try and rap? It is so much harder than you think — rappers are amazing.

This is a great activity for the whole family. Kids take to music well and parents will have fun introducing the kids to the music they like, although their version of “Crying” might not be as strong as Aerosmith’s.

LEGO

If you haven’t built LEGO bricks in a while, you’re really missing out. The directions are so easy to follow and it’s fun to see how everything comes together.

This can be a great activity to alleviate stress. It’s fun to get wrapped up in the building, and there are so many cool sets to choose from. We have sets of Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Batman. And since I have a kid, I can totally pretend like they are for her when I buy them.

Scavenger Hunt

There are a lot of different ways you can go with this. Just Google “scavenger hunt idea” or create your own as I did.

I created a series of clues that led to a final prize by working my way backward and making easy picture clues for my kindergartner to follow. Each picture clue led to an object with another picture clue by it; she was able to follow it very easily and had a blast doing so. She even asked me the next day to make another one.

Read a book

Reading is one of the best ways to better yourself. It doesn’t matter if you’re into non-fiction or fiction; you’re bound to learn a thing or two by picking up a good book.

My favorite author is Mark Twain and my favorite book is The Cider House Rules by John Irving. I also enjoy comic books and Steven King novels. I would encourage you to find what interests you, whether it’s obscure, popular, scholarly, or just plain fun. Getting lost in a book is one of life’s great pleasures.

Make a blanket fort

It had definitely been a few decades since I had done this one, but when I told my daughter we were going to do this, she could not stop talking about it the day before.

“Are there going to be different rooms?” she asked.

“Of course,” I replied. “And a dungeon.”

I was able to find enough blankets and chairs to drape them over to create a few different “rooms” and put some toys here and there for her to discover.

It was not easy crawling around those turns, but she loved it and that’s all that matters.

Cook together

My kid loves to bake so much that she wants to be a baker when she grows up. Every time my wife makes cookies, she has our daughter help add and mix the ingredients.

One thing that I would highly recommend trying out is making a pizza. We were able to get pizza sauce, cheese, and dough — which was very inexpensive — from our local supermarket. Our kid had a blast rolling around the dough and it actually turned out to be delicious.

We thought the dough would be too big for our pan, so we saved some and made a dessert pizza too. That was a great call as it was fantastic. Just add chocolate chips, brown sugar, or whatever other sweet toppings you prefer — you won't be disappointed.