Head out on a family walk and collect leaves as you go. You don’t have to go anywhere special to do this; pretty much any neighborhood is going to have a good variety of leaves you can pick up.

Leaves can be collected and glued to pages, or used in craft projects. You can teach your kids how to identify various leaves, something mine find truly fascinating.

Of course, you’ll need to know something about leaves yourself. You don’t want to go hiking off on a trail and find out you’ve picked poison oak or poison ivy. That’s not a fun way to make a day memorable… until you can laugh about it some years down the line.

Playing with shadows is easy. You don’t have to get out any equipment, although you can.

Kids can make letters with their bodies, learn how to make animal shapes with their fingers or try to make it look as though they’re doing something they normally can’t do. All you need is some sunlight making a long enough shadow to see.

If you want to get fancy, you can hang up a sheet for the kids’ shadows, with an audience on the other side. Add in some dressup clothes and props, and they really can put on a play with their shadows.

This can be a spontaneous game anywhere, not just at home. You can make a game of calling out to the kids to make letters with their shadow just about any time.

Many children love to draw. Yours may well draw just about chronically, with or without you. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be a family project.

You can have free drawing, where everyone draws as they please, or set up a theme, such as scenes from a recent family vacation.

Kids are often fascinated by how differently adults draw from how they do it. You may think that your artistic skills are nothing much, but your children probably won’t care!

We had a lot of fun today. Went to the school playground after dinner and all just played.

And discovered that my husband and I still have that spark.

OK, so the spark was static electricity. You combine dry air with the usual plastic playground equipment, and you can give some pretty good shocks after going down the slide. We had a lot of fun either tapping the person at the bottom of the slide or kissing each time.

Got some pretty good shocks that way, which is of course what started the spark jokes.