When was the last time you played with your kids?

Playtime with your kids can be hard to fit into your schedule. Life gets so busy between work, school, and activities. The days go by, and you realize it has been a long time since you did anything fun as a family. It’s helpful to think of free and cheap ways to play with your kids in advance, so you can be spontaneous about it later.

Play is one of the big ways kids and parents build memories together. Fun kinds of work builds memories too – think of something you made with one of your own parents. But that kind of work is often close to play as well.

Play is important at all ages. The kind of play your kids consider fun will change as they get older – you do not want to play with your kids in elementary school the same as you would a high school student. You’ll get major eye rolls if you try most of the time. There are only a few things that will keep being fun no matter your child’s age, and that will in part depend on his or her personality.

50 Free Or Cheap Ways To Play With Your Kids

1. Build a couch fort.
2. Play dress up.
3. Make homemade ice cream.
4. Bake cookies.
5. Bake a cake from scratch.
6. Make homemade pizza.
7. Have a tea party.
8. Have a water balloon fight.
9. Have a squirt gun fight (try it in the rain!).
10. Run through the sprinklers.
11. Go swimming.
12. Have a picnic.
13. Make an obstacle course.
14. Teach your child to do flips, cartwheels, etc.
15. Have a scavenger hunt.
16. Ride bikes.
17. Go on a hike.
18. Fly kites.
19. Play their favorite sport together.
20. Stargaze, especially if there’s a meteor shower.
21. Camp in the backyard.
22. Climb trees.
23. Go geocaching.
24. Plant a butterfly garden in the spring, and observe the results for months after.
25. Catch bugs. A bug vacuum is helpful for getting a good look.
26. Teach your kids to sew. A stuffed toy snake is easy (just a tube).
27. Play a board game.
28. Have an indoor “snowball fight” with cotton balls.
29. The floor is lava.
30. Blow bubbles (try touchable bubbles and build with them).
31. Draw with your kids (consider a speed drawing challenge).
32. Go to a playground and both of you play.
33. Play Mad Libs.
34. Pretend to be animals.
35. Home spa day. You paint their nails, they paint yours.
36. Play with Legos.
37. Make origami.
38. Solve a jigsaw puzzle.
39. Play video games together.
40. Pillow fight!
41. Play tag, hide and go seek, etc.
42. Play Simon Says.
43. Act out a play.
44. Paint.
45. Make a cosplay outfit.
46. Fly quadcopters.
47. Build something together.
48. Launch rockets.
49. Bad movie night – pick a movie you know is awful and have fun picking it apart.
50. Movie marathon – pick a favorite series and watch them together. Try to stay up all night if necessary.

The post 50 Free Or Cheap Ways To Play With Your Kids appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

Summer is a wonderful time for kids to indulge their creativity. Mine like to work on plays with their friends. If they like acting, encourage them to make a play.

They can write it down or not. My kids prefer to do it all from memory – I’d get a lot of resistance if I wanted them to write it all out. But let them go about things their own way and they’ll work it out.

One of the great parts is how much cooperation making a play requires. There may be arguments, but if the play is going to work out, they have to come to agreements or learn to improvise around each other. Either one can be interesting.

Just be ready to be an appreciative audience at some point. If the kids are happy with what they’ve done, they will need an audience.

The post Make a Play – Day 29 of 30 Days of Keeping Kids Busy During the Summer appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

I really dislike arranging playdates for my kids. It’s not that I don’t want them playing with their friends, it’s that playdates are so limiting!

A part of it is how often, or rather, how rarely I manage to get other parents to agree to playdates. My kids are available to play with friends so much more often than any of their friends are. Drives me nuts!

But the other problem is that so often the other parents tell me no because their child has a playdate with someone else. That drives me nuts because I’m just as happy to have group of kids come and play with mine as I am to have just one of their friends over.

Kind of like when I was a kid.

We’d go over to one friend’s house to see if they could play. Then we’d go together to get more friends. There’d be a nice group of kids playing together, not just two.

These days the only time I see a group of kids invited to play together is for birthday parties. I’d love to see them get together at other times too.

I’m hoping this gets better as the kids get older. I don’t see much sign of it in the neighbor kids, though, so it’s hard to say. I’ve always figured I would rather be the mom with a crowd of kids playing at her house than the mom unsure what her kids are up to. Not that I will mind at all when my kids go over to other friends’ houses.

What are your experiences? Do your kids get to play with a lot of other kids or is this something your family struggles with too?

The post What Happened to Just Playing with Friends? appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

Sometimes the biggest challenge of being home with the kids is, well, the kids. Especially the ones too young for school. It’s exhausting not having a break from them at times. It can be hard to get anything done, whether you’re trying for a bit of housework or trying to earn money from home.

Even if you’re most comfortable with long stretches of work, parenthood often means learning to do more with small bouts of fast work. That’s just how kids are. You have to work hard, work fast and hope they’re feeling cooperative.

Here are some basic activities your kids may enjoy:

1. Having a friend over.

Believe it or not, once they’re used to each other this can really work. An extra child in your house can make it easier because the kids focus on playing with each other, not on trying to get your attention.

Work this one right and you can also earn trades with another stay at home parent. You take their kids, they take yours. Lots of fun for the kids and free quiet time for mom!

2. Water play.

Kids love water. I give my kids a plastic container full of water with some sponges and they take it outside and start scrubbing. This works best with some dish soap added so they have bubbles to enjoy as well.

Water painting can also work. Take a bowl of water, some paintbrushes, and some of the non-glossy ads you get in the mail or your newspaper. You can also use just plain newsprint. Young children love seeing the color change as the paper gets wet.

If the weather is warm enough you can also just set up sprinklers and work on things where you can still supervise as necessary.

3. Computer time.

My 3 year old loves to play on Starfall. It’s very simple for him to use, and means he’s working on the computer next to mine if I’m working. The controls are very simple for the ABC games, so you won’t be stopping too often to help your child out of a jam.

4. Paper and scissors.

Get some child safe scissors, give your child some paper, and let him or her at it.

You may have to watch things a little, as these are sharper than the ones we had as children, and experimentation will inevitably happen. But if you make the consequences good enough for any cutting of hair, clothing or other unauthorized objects the interest in cutting random stuff up goes way down.

The negative can be the cleanup. My kids can get paper just about down to confetti levels when they’re in the mood.

5. Mother’s helper.

I haven’t often used this one, but if a neighborhood child who isn’t quite old enough to babysit wants to earn a little money, this is a great way to let them help you. They just play with the kids and come to you with problems such as diapers, snack time or injuries.

6. Forts.

Kids love to make forts or tents. You can drape a sheet over the table, across some chairs, make it out of couch cushions, whatever works. It’s great for the imagination.

If you have a closet under the stairs you can also have what my family calls Narnia. You could refer to Harry Potter if that’s what your kids prefer, of course. They just play in the very back, doing whatever it is they want to imagine.

This is particularly fun if you are lucky enough to have an under stairway closet that has a turn in it. Kids love places that feel secret.

7. TiVo or DVR.

Yes, it can come down to turning on the TV. I have our TiVo set up to record my kids’ favorite shows. The nice thing is that since they can watch their favorites anytime they don’t spend any time at all waiting for it to come on. No watching a show just because it’s before a favorite, that is.

My 3 year old can even pause it. He loves that so that he can run to the bathroom or go play for a time in the middle of a show. Once he’s distracted from me he’s more likely to go play on his own. A single show running maybe 20 minutes sometimes lasts an hour because he has control.

Different things work for different families, and what works will change as kids get older. But getting any time at all to work when you’re staying at home can be a big treat.

The post 7 Quick Ways to Keep Young Children Busy appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.