Right off the bat, volunteering may not sound like much fun. But not only can it be fun, it can be very educational for the entire family.

With the holiday season coming up, volunteering at the local food bank or soup kitchen is a popular choice. It’s a good way to really help your family to see just how lucky you all are.

Volunteering at a nursing home is another good choice, especially if your kids don’t have grandparents nearby.

Park cleanup days may be an option if your kids are more into the environment. The work can be tedious, but they’ll be able to see results quickly.

There are always plenty of volunteer activities you can do in your area. Just find something that your family is willing to do and give it a try.

Get the box of chalk out and start drawing on the sidewalk with the kids. You don’t have to be a great artist to do this one. The kids sure won’t care. You can always sweep it away if you don’t like how your work turned out.

If you’re in an area without sidewalks, you may have a driveway or walkway up to your home that can be used.

You could also just try drawing a game on the ground. Kids love hopscotch, and what’s more classic than a chalk hopscotch game?

With the holiday season coming up, it’s a great time to express your creativity as a family and start making holiday decorations. For Halloween, for example, you can cut bats out of black construction paper, make ghosts out of tissue paper, and so on.

There are tons of sites with ideas, and if you’re like me the supplies are already on hand for many crafts.

We’ve recently started a tradition in our family of a once a month silly dinner night. It got started because the kids were so tired of being told to mind their table manners, so we declared one night a month to be  freer (not completely free) than usual from the usual table manners rules.

It has now migrated into a silly dinner night.

It’s lots of fun and doesn’t have to cost anything more than a regular dinner. We choose a theme for each one. Last night was breakfast for dinner. Next month it will be dessert first.

You probably enjoyed making paper airplanes as a kid. Why not go at it again with the whole family?

If you don’t remember how to fold a paper airplanes, there are online instructions to make a variety of planes, from simple to more complex.

It’s also a great way to reuse paper, so long as it’s still in good shape. Or the kids can decorate the paper before or after folding.

Kids are likely to enjoy competing with their planes, seeing whose plane can fly the longest, highest or whatever. If you’re worried about things being knocked over by paper airplanes or (more likely) over exuberant children chasing after their planes, make sure you send them outside to fly the planes.

It’s that time of year again. The kids are heading back to school, or maybe off to school for the very first time.

Rather than suggest a new activity this week, I’m going to say look at the things you meant to get done as a family over the summer. The fun stuff. Get going while there’s still time!

Free Fun Fridays are back!

Plan a family treasure hunt. The parents or one of the older kids can write clues or draw a map, and set things up. Everyone else gets to try to find the treasure.

If one of the kids is hiding the remote control, you might just get some desperate treasure hunters!

Kidding, folks, kidding. The house gnomes are really the ones who hid the remote. Kids, don’t hide the remote. Not only does it annoy parents, it makes it harder for you to watch TV!

Depending on ages and interest level, each clue can lead to a prize and a new clue or just a new clue. The early, easier to find prizes should be pretty basic.

Treasure hunts can be indoors or outdoors, although pirate-loving children may well want to be allowed to dig for the final treasure… or at least mine would.

I just realized that I’ve been doing this Free Fun Fridays thing for over a year now. Not quite 52 posts of it, as I wasn’t too regular at first, but still quite a number of posts.

This week’s suggestion I can’t believe I haven’t made before. Read together.

With younger kids, you can read to them. If they know the story from having it read so often, encourage them to fill in the lines by pausing at points you think they know.

Take turns reading with older kids. It can be sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph or page by page, depending on what you think will work for your child’s skills.

One of the fun things about taking a family walk is all the leaves and such you can find. Take advantage and make a collage when you get home.

You can think of different themes or just do a “stuff we found” collage. Maybe look for seeds, or different kinds of leaves.

This can be a great way to encourage the entire family to pay attention to what’s around them as you walk. Not to mention that younger children in particular love making crafts.

Cultural centers and festivals are available in most cities and can be quite a bit of fun. While it’s easy to spend money at some events, there’s generally things you can do for free as well.

You may get to listen to the music of a particular culture or see traditional dances. You could learn a traditional art or craft.

This can be a great chance to talk about your own family’s cultural heritage or introduce the kids to a new one.