75 ideas for activities for kids at home

15. February 2019 - Anika Semmer

Activities for Kids at Home – 75 Creative, Cool and Fun Ideas

Indoor

Playing, crafting or building a cushion castle? These are our creative ideas for activities for kids at home with mom and dad or to play alone.

My niece is a bright four year old full of energy. If she had her way, she’d go outside to romp, play and discover the world in all weathers and seasons. And since she’s about 3, she’s been occupying herself for increasingly longer periods of time on her own, jumping enthusiastically at shared creative games for which you provide the impetus. But as it is, I often have to work at the same time, do the housework or the weather just doesn’t play along.

Since it’s important to me to spend quality time with my godchild and to awaken his imagination and creativity, I started to get creative and wrote a list of ideas for activities for kids. It now hangs on my fridge and we are diligently exploring it from front to back over the next few years.

The two of us already have some favorites that my niece keeps asking for. I’ll tell you this much: for her 4th birthday, I’ll give her a tepee with fairy lights, because she loves narrative games, fantasy stories and treasure hunts so much that she’s already built her own surprise caves and hidden treasures for us adults.

75 Creative Ideas for Activities for Kids at Home

Crafting is a good children's activity when it's raining, letting your imagination run wild.

Getting creative with crafting is a nice children’s activity when it’s raining

Play, explore, craft – there are so many creative ways to keep kids busy when it rains. Almost all of these 75 activities for kids at home can be done without preparing or shopping.

30 Great Games for Children

For toddlers, the apartment is one big playground. They prefer to play with everything that is actually taboo for them. But it is not difficult to draw their attention to beautiful, allowed toys and games, such as pillows, cardboard boxes and balloons. The things you can play with trivial household items are great as kids’ activities in the rain!

Those who know Abenteuer Freundschaft know that I love games anyway and am a big game kid. So I also have a big collection of family board games – but most of them are family games for kids from 6-8 years old. On our website you can discover lots of board game tips of all kinds.

Playing hide and seek – with toddlers it is enough to put a cloth over her head and act surprised, meanwhile she already hides herself, although always in the same places :-).

Hide a cuddly toy and the child goes on the search.
Crawling course – built from anything in the apartment that does not pose a risk of injury.
Hopscotch game – lay out pillows, newspapers, books on the floor and the child hops from one to the other without touching the floor.

Play story games – find 5 storytelling games here.
Washi tape road on the edge of bubble wrap on the smooth floor (e.g. kitchen) and balance on it and let cars drive. Removes easily without leaving any residue.
Let the kid hop on your knees and let it fly like an airplane.

Fill the children’s paddling pool with plastic balls and off to the ball pool.
Color search – you give the child an object in one color and a bowl. Now he looks for all objects in this color in the apartment (or just the children’s room).
Clean out box – in my apartment I have a fabric box from Ikea where I collect bits and pieces, games and puzzles that are suitable for children’s activity in the rain. But it’s much more exciting to check if there’s something new in the box every time and to take it out and put it away.

Treasure hunt in the basement – usually she won’t let go of my hand when it gets dark but the basement compartment with all the items is terribly exciting and the excitement is great when she finds one of her beloved toys there.
Treasure hunt in the attic – I live in a historic old building in Berlin, there is a big attic that smells nice and musty, with roof beams, hung paintings, old furniture and lots of inspiration for bedtime stories.
Race

Cinderella game – mix beans, chestnuts, lentils, peas in a bowl and the child sorts them into the hollows of an egg carton
Collecting natural materials and playing a laying game with them
Taste game – cut fruits and vegetables into pieces, make blindfold guess what it is

Touch game – put objects under a cloth and let the child feel what it is
Pot banging
Listening game – blindfold, make sounds and let them guess what it is

Play a bingo game
Memory game – put 4-10 objects on the table, the child closes their eyes and you take one away and they have to guess which one it was
Use your bed as a bouncy castle

Play balloon games
Play with filled balloons – e.g. fill with rice, peas, oatmeal, semolina – which one flies the highest / farthest?
Search for kitchen alarm clock – set alarm clock and hide it; child searches for it by ear (ticking & ringing)

Use play train tracks as a slide, let the teddy bear slide and go off with the train (we often play this at mom’s house)
Jigsaw puzzles – the older, the more pieces
Dressing up and getting into a different role

Set up various pots, bowls, pans, plastic buckets to form a drum set in a circle and have the child play with a wooden spoon
Set up climbing course with chairs (she needs to get older for this)

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20 Craft Ideas as Activities for Kids at Home

Crafting is one activities for kids at home that's great to do on the side and keep helping your child.

So many possibilities! Crafting is one of the most creative children’s activities

My craft materials are at least as exciting as the crafting itself. If I don’t have anything specific planned and I’m working at the table and can supervise the little one, I simply spread out my child-friendly, harmless craft materials including wiggle eyes, glitter in plastic jars, stickers, transparent and colored paper, and already cut-out motifs and torn scraps of paper. It’s exciting to watch what she takes and then what work of art emerges.

Being there quickly, helping out and pre-crafting is important so that the little ones don’t get frustrated when something doesn’t work out.

Make your own book – cut out motifs (animals, vehicles, what she or he thinks is great) from magazines and glue them on. Then I laminate the pages and staple them together.
Browse through the toy catalog and cut out and glue on the biggest wishes.

Make a memory
Making collages from favorite motifs
Make things with chestnuts – Here you can find ideas for making chestnut owls

Crafting with toilet paper rolls – for Easter, for example, make a toilet roll Easter bunny or an toilet roll Easter chick
Make blow pictures – put a blob of paint diluted with water on a paper and blow it into shape.
Crumple paper scraps into balls and glue them on to motifs

Painting sand pictures – paint on paper with wallpaper paste, sprinkle sand over it and let it dry
Knead figures together and play with them – highlight for my niece is breaking them afterwards…. 😀
Paint color dots with fingertips, champagne corks, plastic lids (make nice rings) and wine corks

Paint handprint pictures e.g. for Halloween on black paper and stick wiggle eyes on it
Print jute bag for mom with potato stamps and fabric paint
Using finger paints paint a piece of art on a large sheet of paper on the floor with hands and feet

Make decorations for spring, Easter and Christmas from salt dough
Crafting with papier-mâché – e.g. gluing paper scraps around a balloon
Crafting for the store – forming and painting vegetables, breads and rolls out of salt dough

Making candles from beeswax
Coloring pictures (in coloring books)
Making a lantern for the St. Martin’s procession

10 Beautiful Ideas to Build With Everyday Objects

Building is a activity for kids at home that takes time but is immensely fun.

Building with cushions or from cardboard boxes is a activity at home that is always fun

First we build, then we play. When building a cave and building toys out of cardboard boxes, you help. Afterwards, the child often plays alone and can occupy himself with it for a long time.

Building a castle – out of sofa cushions, blankets and I also like to stretch wine over which I can throw a cloth.

Build dragon’s den – under the coffee table.
…build a house out of a cardboard box and stick it on and paint it
…build a kitchen and paint it

…build and paint a store
Build a car out of a diaper or shoe box with Nutella jar lids as wheels (yes, I love Nutella :-))
Build a puppet theater out of a moving box and play with hand puppets

Build a crawling course together
Build a house out of Duplo bricks
Build a tower out of objects and toys

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15 Additional Activities for Kids at Home

Cleaning or tidying up can also be a activity for kids at home, because kids want to join in.

Just spend the time together and let the child join in

Cleaning can be fun. And cooking, too, of course. Simply letting children participate in what you have to do yourself sometimes prolongs cleaning and baking considerably, but at the same time makes it much more fun. Plus, there are plenty of fun activities for kids to try.

Treasure hunt – her absolute favorite. Either I hide something and she looks for it or I send her off to find and retrieve an item. Suggestion for a Halloween treasure hunt for kids can be found here.
Cooking along – everything adults do is exciting. When I cook, the little one sits on the kitchen floor, gets empty pans, pots, wooden spoons, and wooden vegetables, and gets to dig in hard.
Baking together

Singing – she likes it best when we sing ourselves, but there are also many beautiful children’s songs on Youtube.
Dancing to music – at her daycare, the kids dance a lot and she loves it so much that she just dances without music.
Singing movement songs

Listening to an audio book along with a children’s story
Examining handbag, naming and rearranging items
Frolicking on the couch

Sowing kitchen herbs and watching them grow – then harvesting and tasting them together
Cleaning together – what adults do is great, and the same goes for cleaning. Even if the enthusiasm usually doesn’t last very long :-).
Blowing and catching soap bubbles (best on the balcony / in case of rain break in the garden or yard)

Balloon bed – fill a comforter cover with inflated balloons, let the child crawl inside and let the balloons dance from the outside.
Bathtub game – have plastic animals sink in the bathtub and have the child dive afterwards
Reading aloud, embellishing the story and having them correct it and tell it along with it

Looking for more ideas for kids’ activities in the rain? Discover even more activities with kids that will keep the boredom away every day. At Abenteuer Freundschaft many colorful ideas for creative leisure time activities are waiting for you and your family, for friends and couples 😉

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