Summer Family Fun: 55 Ideas

July 10, 2013June 13, 2024 / Laura Grace Weldon / 6 Comments

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1. Have a watermelon speed spitting contest. “Outside, I said outside!”

2. Set up a bike, trike, or scooter obstacle course. Mark the course with sidewalk chalk or masking tape. The course may lead them around cones, through a sprinkler, under crepe paper streamers hanging from a tree branch, and on to a finish line. Then encourage kids to set up their own obstacle courses.

3. Hang water-filled balloons from your backyard swing set or low tree branch as splashy pinatas.

4. Make popsicles with secret ingredients, create edible worms, drink burb juice, serve food in tiny dishes, encourage kids to cook together. Here are dozens of other summer food fun ideas to try.

5. Make story stones and let the storytelling begin.

6. Set up backyard bowling. Save 10 empty plastic bottles, set them up in a triangular pattern, then roll a ball toward them. This makes a satisfying clatter on the driveway. If you like, teach your kids how to keep score.

7. Go on a camera scavenger hunt. First choose a theme, like Ten Things That Move or A Dozen Signs of Summer. Then send kids out to grab some images. Encourage them to find creative, funny, and unusual ways to interpret the theme.

8. Pan fry dandelion flowers into tasty appetizers.

9. Encourage loose parts play.

10. Build a bat house.

11. Make your own ice cream sandwiches. Just glob ice cream between homemade or purchased cookies, wrap in plastic wrap and chill. Try different cookie and ice cream variations. Mix-ins work too, like bananas mashed into strawberry ice cream and stuck between two oatmeal cookies. You’ll have to do some immediate taste testing, part of the burden of innovation.

12. Encourage grubby fun. Designate an area of the yard where kids can play right in the dirt. They might want to set up a mudpie kitchen with a few cast-offs from your real kitchen. They might want to use the area to build mountains and valleys for their toy dinosaurs, cars, or action figures. They might want to dig holes, perhaps looking for archaeological finds using Hands-On Archaeology: Real-Life Activities for Kids as a guide.

13. Since they’re going to get dirty, you might want to let them set up a washing station to wash outdoor toys. Maybe neighborhood friends’ toys too.

14. Play classic outdoor games, the ones every kid used to know.

15. Let each child plant one “crop” in the garden that is his or hers to tend. Fast-growing plants like sugar snap peas, radishes, and green beans are ideal. Let the kid farmer in charge be the one to check regularly for weeds, watering needs, and harvest times. For more ideas check out Gardening Projects for Kids and for those of you without yards or community garden plots, try Kids’ Container Gardening.

16. Make soda bottle rockets.

17. Mail yourselves postcards when you go somewhere for the day, even around town. Later in the week kids will think it’s a hoot to get a card from themselves. Check out 37 other ways to have fun with snail mail.

18. Make your own “lava lamp.”

19. Let yeast blow up a balloon. Have kids write their names on balloons with a permanent marker. Using a funnel, let them fill each balloon with 1 teaspoon sugar and 1 teaspoon dry yeast. Add a little warm water to each balloon, tie shut, and shake to mix. Then put them outside on a hot sunny day. Check to see how big the balloons have gotten every ten minutes or so. Guess what might happen to balloons that get too big.

20. Designate your yard as a nature area.

21. Give the kids a budget and let them plan what the family will do next Saturday.

22. Throw a BYOB party. This is cheap, imagination-driven fun. You wield cutting implements and supply lots of tape. Guests are charged with one simple task: Bring. Your. Own. Box. Together kids can construct a fort or spaceship or whatever they please out of the boxes, then spend hours playing in it. There are plenty of other ways to amuse kids with cardboard boxes too.

23. Get out a big, somewhat complicated puzzle and work on it when it’s too hot to go outside.

24. Work with kids to create an outdoor water wall.

25. Make a worm tower or indoor worm farm. For more information, check out Worms Eat My Garbage: How to Set Up and Maintain a Worm Composting System.

26. Slap the label “memory jar” on any large container and encourage your family to toss in slips of paper describing an ordinary day, funny family sayings, silly happenings, and other things that might slip your minds. This memory jar can become an important family tradition.

27. Throw a backyard batik party and enjoy messy art-making with a crowd.

28. See how far everyone can advance their hula hooping skills. You’ll want to provide a good example of enthusiasm. Here’s how to make a hoop that will fit your, ahem, grown-up hips.

29. Get retro and experience a drive-in movie with your kids. You can search this database to find one nearest you. If there’s no hope of finding one remotely close by, set up a backyard movie theater. You might want to invite the neighborhood for an ’80s family film fest. To give it that drive-in vibe, kids can make their own cars out of cardboard boxes. That way during the movie they can sit with their feet up on a cardboard dash and spill popcorn all over the cardboard interior without anyone bugging them about it.

30. Set up a backyard zip-line between two trees.

31. Investigate solar power. Make solar prints by arranging objects on photo-sensitive sheets in a SunPrint Paper Kit, then set outside to print like magic. Build a solar-powered cockroach using these Instructables directions. Assemble your own solar cooker and make lunch using only the sun’s rays for heat. You can find all sorts of plans here.

32. Make your own bubble solution. Or try bouncing bubbles, a recipe for durable bubbles with no glycerin needed.

33. Let little ones “paint” the house, car, driveway, and everything else. All that’s needed are wide paintbrushes and an empty paint can or small bucket of water. Water wiped on with a brush temporarily darkens many surfaces, giving toddlers the satisfying impression they are “painting.” It dries quickly so they can paint again.

34. Perform good deeds. These are easy to do, even with toddlers, when you focus on Guerrilla Encouragement Acts. For more family volunteering ideas, check 40 Ways to Volunteer, Toddler to Teen.

35. Keep fruits like bananas, mangoes, pineapple, strawberries, and peaches in separate containers in the freezer. On different days let each child take a turn concocting a smoothie for the family by blending his or her choice of fruit with juice and/or yogurt in the blender. Serve in tiny cups for taste testing. Encourage the creator to come up with a name for the frozen delight, like Toby’s Tooth Freeze or Sadie’s Strawberry Slush.

36. Use an old clay pot to make a toad house in the yard.

37. Make temporary designs with fizzing sidewalk paint.

38. Hand out old sheets so kids can hang them from tree branches and swing sets to make hideouts. Or make them using hula hoops.

39. Make rainbow bubble snakes.

40. Attach a hat to a wire. Take it and a pair of shoes different places (house and yard, or on the town), documenting how an invisible person spends the day via photos.

41. Freeze fancy ice cubes. Tuck mint leaves, fresh berries, lemon wedges, or cut up fruit bits in ice cubes trays. You can also freeze lemonade or juice. Hydration suddenly seems more flavorful.

42. Use a bleach pen to decorate t-shirts, pillow cases, hats, tote bags. A plain dark-colored background gives the best results.

43. Set up relay races. It’s a great way to get your loved ones to hop in sacks and crawl with laundry baskets. When summer is gone you’ll want those photos.

44. Cook something over a campfire or fire pit together. Standards are a hot dog or marshmallow on a stick, although you can find 100 other ideas in Campfire Cooking

45. Bat balloons around with pool noodles. Yes, the kids will sword fight with them. It’s inevitable.

46. For older kids, give in and make foam swords. For peace of mind you may also want to make foam-covered shields, foam body pads, and operate on a no-running-hits/no-face-hits rule. Any violation and parents get to use the swords. Or simply fence with cardboard tubes. The Cardboard Tube Fighting League rules are worthy indeed.

47. Make homemade playdough using one of these six recipes. No mess to clean up indoors when they use it on a picnic table.

48. Try geocaching or become an orienteering family. Exercise, map skills, and outdoor fun!

49. On clear nights, go outside to look for constellations. This is just one special way to enjoy together the ever-shorter evenings as summer progresses. Savor the darkness together with full moon walks, playing flashlight games, telling tall tales, making shadow puppets, and more.

50. Encourage kids to throw corn cobs in the grass at your next picnic. Legend in my family says it distracts the bugs. When it’s clean up time, whoever picks up the most cobs wins a coveted window seat on the way home. Surely you can come up with a similar cob-related perk. Added plus, everyone wants to wash their gooey hands before leaving.

51. Turn part of a fence into a homemade chalkboard. Perfect for signs, tic tac toe, or graffiti-style inspiration.

52. Make homemade chalk.

53. Take a meal outdoors, sit on the grass, and eat directly from the plate without hands or utensils. We call this “trough feeding” and it’s been a summer tradition. Bet you can’t do it without laughing through the whole meal. Bet you’ll also find yourselves talking about how different animals eat.

54. Make sponge bombs out of cheap household sponges, then soak and use for tossing games. (For example, a target drawn in chalk on the driveway.) Unlike water balloons, these will last all summer. They also make a lovely smacking sound when dropped on an unsuspecting sibling from the top of a slide. I warned you…

55. Fill your passports. Well, homemade passports. Give each child a small blank book. Together with your kids make a list of parks, fairs, festivals, and other events you’d like to attend. Each time you do, bring back a souvenir. It might be a leaf, a ticket stub, or a photo. Paste it in the blank book with a sentence or two about the adventure. At the end of summer you’ll have a book of memories.

Some activities from Free Range Learning.

Throw Strangely Amusing Parties

October 18, 2012 / Laura Grace Weldon / 11 Comments

We used to throw strangely amusing parties on a more regular basis. Box parties where kids made forts and mazes and castles out of huge boxes. Tie dye and batik parties that were a messy extravaganza of color. Science-y gatherings where everyone worked on the same ridiculous experiment with vastly different results. Even an election commiseration event where everyone had to bring a few jokes about a certain president whose name rhymed with “tush.”

The longest lasting tradition? Our summer pig pen parties. These were grand messy BYOB affairs, as in bring your own bucket—of dirt. It was dumped in a backyard kiddie pool and mixed by all children in attendance into perfectly creamy mud, which they used to coat themselves until they were recognizable only by bathing suit outlines. We put a garden hose at the top of our slide and the kids careened down in glorious streaks of mud. We handed out cans of shaving cream for use as body décor (with firm instructions to avoid faces because it’s not fun in the eyes). We brought out ample water balloon supplies. And we insisted the kids eat without utensils or hands, just direct face to plate. Like pigs. Of course these parties got out of hand once the grown-ups refused to sit in lawn chairs watching their kids have all the fun. Some neighbors showed up in pig masks, others showed up with water balloons sneakily hidden in baby strollers and red wagons, others brought massive auxiliary supplies of shaving cream. Normally well-behaved men used hoses to fill garbage cans with water, which they dumped over the heads of the few civilized mommies who thought they’d keep their hair looking nice. One year the entire assemblage of pig pen partiers were incensed that a regular pig pen attendee decided to stay home to repair a fence. All of us walked down to the street in wet, muddy, shaving cream streaked glory to drag him to the party. His police chief father who was there helping him make the repairs looked seriously alarmed. We dragged him anyway.

I’ve been fantasizing about a backyard Jackson Pollack party where everyone brings leftover paint to fling at canvases, maybe even using the giant trebuchet our kids built for some super-charged paint tossing. I can just see us all in splattered clothes, posing for a group picture with candy cigarettes hanging out of our mouths. What’s stopping me? I live with practical people who wonder if paint will get tracked in the house because partygoers are human and will eventually need to use the bathroom.

My recent event was a quietly civilized affair: a collage party for some artful cutting and pasting. I have all sorts of glue-able stuff here. Old sheet music, sewing patterns, stockbooks, wallpaper, tiny do-dads, lace, game pieces. All I asked people to bring were their own scissors, marked with their names (because scissors are migratory beasts) and a potluck offering. They brought a lot more glue-able stuff to share. I thought we’d stick down some background, let it dry while we ate and drank, then finish and move on to a second or third one each. But my friends ate and drank and talked while collaging. They didn’t want to stop cutting and arranging. It’s as if we all have too little time for something as simply satisfying as placing a scrap of paper on a page exactly as it pleases us. The event was less lively than the average pig pen party, that’s for sure. But it was restorative. No phones. No screens. Nothing else to do but indulge in the kind of play we call creating. I guess that doesn’t happen unless we make time for it.

Here’s a sample of collage party creations. (Some are backgrounds awaiting finishing touches.)

And let me know your ideas for strangely amusing events. I plan to steal them.

Reading Readiness Has To Do With The Body

August 7, 2012June 17, 2022 / Laura Grace Weldon / 120 Comments

Today’s kids sit more than ever. Babies spend hours confined in car seats and carriers rather than crawling, toddling, or being carried. As they get older their days are often heavily scheduled between educational activities and organized events. Children have 35 percent less time for free play than they did a generation ago, and that’s before factoring in distractions like TV or video games.

Left to their own devices, children move. They hold hands and whirl in a circle till they fall down laughing. They beg to take part in interesting tasks with adults. They want to face challenges and try again after making mistakes. They climb, dig, and run. When they’re tired they like to be rocked or snuggled. According to the authors of A Moving Child Is A Learning Child, stifling these full body needs actually impairs their ability to learn.

Sensory experience and fun. (CC by 2.0 Micah Sittig)

We know that our little ones walk and talk on their own timetables. No rewards or punishments are necessary to “teach” them. Yet children are expected to read, write and spell starting at five and six years old as if they develop the same way at the same time. Academics are pushed on young children with the assumption this will make them better students. This approach is not only unnecessary, it may be contributing to problems such as learning disorders, attention deficits, and long term stress.

Studies contrasting reading instruction at age five compared to instruction at age seven find earlier lessons may damage reading development. By the time children reach the age of 11, students who were instructed earlier show poorer text comprehension and less positive attitudes toward reading than children whose instruction started later.

Literacy isn’t easy. It requires children to decode shapes into sounds and words, to remember these words correctly in written and spoken form, and to understand their meaning. Allowing reading to develop naturally or teaching it later tends to create eager, lifelong readers. Why?

Children pushed to read early (not those who naturally pick it up) tend to rely on right brain processes because that area matures more quickly. These early readers are likely to guess at unknown words using clues such as appearance, context, beginning and ending letters. Their main tactic is memorizing sight words. These are valuable methods but not a balanced approach to reading. Such children may quickly tire after reading short passages or read smoothly but have difficulty deriving meaning from what they read. The procedure they use to decode words can make the content hard to comprehend. These reading problems can persist.

On the other hand, children benefit when they learn to read naturally or are taught later. That’s because, as the left brain matures and the pathway between both hemispheres develops, it becomes easier for them to sound out words, to visualize meanings, and mentally tinker with abstractions. They memorize short sight words but sound out longer words, an approach that is less taxing. As they incorporate more words into their reading vocabulary they more easily picture and understand what they are reading.

In order for children to read, write and spell they must be developmentally ready. Some are ready at the age of four or five, some not for many years later. This readiness includes complex neurological pathways and kinesthetic awareness. It includes the proprioceptive sense developed through sensory receptors in the muscles, joints, and tendons: a form of maturation essential for a physical sense of self (even essential for learning how to modulate one’s voice and to hold objects carefully).

Such readiness isn’t created by workbooks or computer programs. It’s the result of brain maturation as well as rich experiences found in bodily sensation and movement.

These experiences happen as children play and work, particularly in ways that cross the midline. They includes expansive movements such as climbing, jumping, digging, swimming, playing hopscotch and catch, riding bikes, sweeping, running. They also include fine movements such as chopping vegetables, drawing, building, playing rhyming and clapping game s, using scissors, and playing in sand. And of course there’s the essential growth that comes from snuggling, listening to stories, singing, trying new tastes, enjoying make believe. Children are drawn to such experiences. Without these bodily experiences, warns pediatric occupational therapist Angela Hanscom, they won’t have a strong foundation for learning. (Find out more in her book Balanced and Barefoot: How Unrestricted Outdoor Play Makes for Strong, Confident, and Capable Children.)

These activities stimulate the child’s brain to develop new neural pathways. Such activities also build confidence, smooth sensory processing, and create a bank of direct experience that helps the child visualize abstract concepts. Well-intended adults may think a good use of a rainy afternoon is a long car ride to an educational exhibit. A young child is likely to derive more developmental value (and fun) from stomping in puddles and digging in mud followed by play time in the tub.

There are many other factors contributing to reading readiness. Perhaps most important is a supportive family life where play, reading, and conversation are an enjoyable part of each day. But it helps to remember that young children want to participate in the purposeful work of making meals, fixing what’s broken, and planting the garden. They also need free time without the built-in entertainment of specialized toys, television, or video games. Their development is cued to movement. These bodily experiences prepare children for the magic found when shapes become words, words become stories, and they become readers.

Portions of the post excerpted from Free Range Learning.

Natural Antidote To Bullying

April 4, 2012 / Laura Grace Weldon / 13 Comments

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Children are drawn to challenge themselves. They need to take risks of all kinds—physical, social, emotional, intellectual—in order to grow into mature self-reliance.

Where do such challenges most naturally occur? Outdoors. As detailed in Last Child in the Woods, when children spend time in natural areas their play is more creative and they self-manage risk more appropriately. They’re more likely to incorporate each other’s ideas into expressive make-believe scenarios using their dynamic surroundings—tall grasses become a savannah, tree roots become elf houses, boulders become a fort. Their games are more likely to incorporate peers of differing ages and abilities. Regular outdoor experiences not only boost emotional health, memory, and problem solving, they also help children learn how to get along with each other in ever-changing circumstances. Free outdoor play with others, especially when it’s not hampered by adult interference, teaches kids to interact with others while also maintaining self-control. Otherwise, no one wants to play with them. It’s the best sort of learning because it’s fun. Sounds like the perfect way to raise bully-proof kids doesn’t it?

But the opportunity for free play and risk is funneled into very narrow options for today’s children. They are shuttled from one adult-run activity to another. Time between these obligations is often spent indoors. And children’s outdoor play is restricted by excessive rules designed to keep them safe from dangers out of proportion to any real safety issue.

So kids don’t get natural challenges like climbing trees, exploring fields, building forts. They are deprived of the rich lessons of cooperation and self-control found in free play. And they don’t develop biophilia, that essential sense of connection with nature. Then we expect them to get along and recognize real risk. Any wonder that bullying is a growing problem?

Here are examples of playground designs that, in institutions like schools and daycare programs, foster free play using natural materials. Sensory play, places for solitude, and opportunities for physical risk are built in and, no surprise, children get along better.

It’s a step in the right direction. A few steps farther and we’ll let kids back in nature herself, playing in woods and fields and beaches. Too bad all the money thrown at anti-bullying programs aren’t used to fling open the doors to the natural world. “Go out and play,” may very well be the best anti-bullying advice yet.