Does your family mope and pout when the gray skies come out? Perhaps it’s time to arm yourself with a bag of tricks for rainy days that excite everyone in the house!
Whether your family likes games, creativity, or plenty of pretend play, you can find activities to enjoy while they stay warm and cozy indoors. Read on for some of our best tips for beating the cloudy blues with the best things to do on a rainy day.
Put On Your Chef Hat
Some of the best rainy day activities will get the creative juices flowing. How about baking a batch of your family’s favorite cookies? Allowing your kids free reign in the kitchen will offer many benefits besides keeping them busy indoors. Cooking and baking provide your children lessons in math, science, and reading. Following a recipe requires reading words and understanding measurements. If you want to increase the potential for math facts, double the cookie recipe you are making. Kids will have to figure out how to add ¾ to ¾ and double other ingredients as well. The act of combining certain ingredients to create an entirely new substance is science at its finest. Plus cooking is really messy, making it an easy favorite for most of the little people in your house!
Get Artistic
For the budding Picassos, cover the kitchen table with a plastic tablecloth and get out the finger paints and paper. Don’t just stand back and watch the children either. Perhaps you have forgotten how much fun it is to create masterpieces with your fingers! Your children will love to see your artistic abilities and it might inspire them to create their own works of art.
Other easy craft ideas include making mosaics with a bag of beans, a bottle of glue, and a few sheets of construction paper. Have your kids create a design on the paper with a magic marker, and then let them fill in the spaces by gluing on the beans. For best results, use a variety of beans in different sizes, shapes, and colors, or use pieces of yarn, pasta or cereal for additional variety. For those who prefer activities on paper to crafts, you can find plenty of free printables on the Internet that will offer children hours of dot-to-dot and maze fun. Older children can enjoy color-by-number activities and simple coloring pages. You can find many great printable pages at websites such as FamilyFun.com.