Chances are that your kids are counting down the days until their summer vacation begins. You may not be sharing the same excitement level because the start of their vacation means you need to start finding ways to keep them busy and from hearing those dreaded words, “I’m bored”.
While you can always take them in the yard to run off some of that energy, there are days when that’s going to get old and they’re going to look for more.
It’s days like these when you need to get creative and give them an activity they may not be expecting. Check out these five ideas to cure summer boredom.
1. Create an Indoor/Outdoor Scavenger Hunt.
You can tailor this activity to your child’s age and the weather forecast. You can save it for a rainy day and do it in the house or do it outside on a sunny day. The choice is yours. Either way, you can set up your scavenger hunt by first choosing a theme. If your child likes dinosaurs, you can use this by creating a list of clues to different dinosaur-themed items that you’ve hid around the house or yard. The hunt is not over until all the items are found!
2. Create a Photo Album.
Kids these days are living in a world of jpegs and iClouds.
Gone are the days of developing film and putting pictures in photo albums. Share memories with your children by going through photos, printing them out, and putting them in a photo album. You can choose new photos and mix them with old ones you may actually already have printed out. This is a great rainy day activity!
3. Volunteer.
Take a day out of your summer vacation to take your children to volunteer. It can be anything from making pictures for people in a nursing home to spending time planting at a community garden.
Get busy looking into what opportunities are available in your area and match them up to your child’s age and interests. You may be surprised at what you find!
4. Camp Out at Home.
Who says you have to leave home to go camping? Pack up and pitch a tent in the yard for some at-home camping.
Treat it as if you were actually leaving the house (ok maybe you can run in the house to go to the bathroom!). Make s’mores, tell ghost stories, look at the stars…have a real camping experience right at home!
5. Old-fashioned fun day.
Create a day of old-fashioned fun for your kids complete with water balloon tosses, sack races, bubbles, and anything else you can get your hands on. You can use pillow cases for the sack races and get most of the other essentials at any store. For a little variety you could set up each little fun station as a different country and create “passports to fun” for your kids and stamp them when they reach each station. Perhaps offer a prize at the end when their passports are full.
The idea is to think out of the box and provide your kids with activities they would never have thought of doing themselves. While you may not be able to totally cure the “I’m bored-itis” you’ll certainly give it a time-out for a while! Good luck and happy summer!