Are Your Kids Bored Yet? Try These Easy Activities For Kids!

Now that we’re knee-deep in the midst of summer, I knew that it was time for me to put together my list of fun activities for kids to do.

While I’m a firm believer that some boredom is good for children, as it forces them to get creative and think outside of the box, I also knew I needed some fun items and activities to make memories and have some fun.

Some of these are no cost, some are low cost- all depends on what you already have at home! A lot of these tend to be geared towards kiddos that are 3-9, but a lot could be adapted for a wider age group.

Art Activities for Kids

Some of our favorite art items to do in the summer tend to be really messy. Why? Because it’s easy to just hose them down! Here are a few of our favorite art projects:

Bubble Paint: Take bubble solution and add a few drops of food coloring into the solution. I like tape some large pieces of paper to the fence or side of our house. Then you dip your wand into the color of choice and blow towards the paper. It will leave really cool bubble prints on the paper!

Squirt Gun Painting: similar premise to above. Start with paper and then fill some water guns with either diluted paint or water with food coloring. Then let the kids go and shoot to their desire! If you don’t have squirt guns, plastic spray bottles can work just as well!

Rock Painting: This one is nice because it can be done inside or outside! There are a lot of great kits out there that you can purchase that take a lot of the guesswork out of rock painting. Or you can use acrylic paint on any old rock you find (You can often buy larger river rocks at your local craft or garden store). The other awesome part with these is you can hide them, put them in your garden, or give them away!

Shadow Drawings: When it’s nice and sunny out, we like to take pieces of paper and do shadow drawings. Basically we like to find something, draw around the shadow of an item, and then take our shadow drawings into the shade or inside and finish coloring/filling them in. We’ve down outlines of our heads, plants, toys, animal figurines- so many choices!

Scavenger Hunts

This is a popular activity at my house. My sons (4 and 6), absolutely love them. We change the themes all the time. Sometimes it’s based on a letter, or sometimes I will take a blank piece of paper and put colored circles on it, and they have to find items by color. Sometimes our hunts are based on a theme (aka outdoors, at the store, at the park). Easy to do with just a single piece of paper!

Toys Reimagined

Sometimes one of the easiest activities is to put a new spin on old toys. I can’t tell you how many buckets of toys we have set aside after my kiddos get bored with them. Sometimes, those old toys are the perfect thing to bring fun back into the house! Here are a few things we do with toys we already have laying around the house:

LEGOs: We will have LEGO challenges. We take turns naming something to build and we all build our version of the theme. Houses, robots, animals, cars- it’s amazing to see what children will come up with! Plus it expands their creativity, fine motor skills, and brings life back into those LEGO sets.

Magnatiles: We will take our Magnatiles outside on nice days and let the boys use our garage door to stick and build creations. I think they really like having a different angle to build on. If it’s rainy, we’ve also been known to let them do this on our fridge.

Hot Wheels Course: We have so many toy cars, it’s ridiculous, and we also have a lot of playsets that go with them. Sometimes, the best thing to do with these is to set aside the fancy ramps and sets. Instead, dig out old-fashioned blocks and hard covered books and let them build their own sets and ramps.

There are so many things you can do with what you already have, sometimes it just takes looking at items in a slightly different way and making it happen!

Any fun activities for kids that are tried and true for your family?

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