Fun Rainy Day Ideas to Keep Kids Happy
Rainy days and bored children are a nightmare combination. Here are four foolproof ideas for keeping the kids happy.
Rainy Day Ideas
Make a family cookbook
Bind together some colored, thin cardboard to make a homemade book, and then ask your kids to bring their favorite pens and pencils. Then compile your favorite recipes! This can be the things you cook all the time or the meals that your children love the best. Have sections for main courses, like pizza or chicken salad, and desserts. You can have a section for making up your own recipes too! Leave a page free opposite each recipe. Later on, the kids can sit down and illustrate it. Once you’re done, have each child pick a recipe to make. If you’ve got lots of kids, plan to do one night that week. If you’re feeling particularly dedicated, laminate the pages before binding to make sure it stands the test of time!
Plan an amazing trip
Use your rainy day to plan a family vacation or adventure. You can also use the activity as a geography lesson. Get out a big map and tell them all about different countries. What language they speak, how big the country is and how they have different currency, for example. As for your destination, how about France? A Paris short let is ideal thanks to a wealth of child-friendly activities available in the French capital. Staying in a rental rather than a hotel is also far easy if you’ve got young ones in tow. Starting the trip in Europe is also a good idea as it puts you in close proximity to other countries if you want to see more. You can hop across the channel to the UK, for example, or down to Spain.
Turn the living room into a den
Dens are magical for children, but let’s be honest, they’re just as fun for adults too! You can get creative with whatever you have on hand, but there are loads of guides out there that will help you along the way. This guide breaks the task down into five steps. It uses items you’ll already have in the house, like chairs and towels. Or, if you want to go all out, head to your nearest fabric shop and buy some material. There are a whopping 35 ideas for what you can make with a little time here. Inspiration sites like Pinterest are also fantastic for ideas.
Make cleaning and tidying a fun challenge
Cleaning the house doesn’t have to be boring if you turn it into a challenge. You can split the house up in lots of different ways. One idea is to assign everybody a room. Assigning the kids their own rooms could be handy, or mix things up and assign them each others. Make it a timed task for some urgency. Or, have a great prize at the end for the tidiest room. Alternatively, take on a room together. Play some music, make a table of snacks and make the experience a little more fun. It will keep bored kids busy and at the end of the day? You have a clean and tidy house. Bonus!