Fun without the sun: 9 Rainy Day Activities for Kids. Looking for things to do on a rainy day? Indoor Fun on a rainy day with crafts, games and STEAM activities for preschoolers!
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Rainy Day Activities for Kids
There’s no school, no practice, and no scheduled playdates, but there’s rain in the forecast. What do you do for indoor fun on a rainy day? Get creative, of course! Rainy days are all about keeping kids entertained without resorting to YouTube, video games, or TV, and there are surprisingly tons of cool ways to do it. Whether it’s through an easy science experiment, hands on nature art or letting our preschoolers put their engineering skills to work!
- Are you stumped on how to keep your youngsters fully engaged when the weather’s unpleasant?
- What can you do on a rainy day at home?
Indoor Activities for Kids
Just because there’s no school doesn’t mean it’s not learning time. It’s always learning time if you know how to think like a teacher (and disguise learning lessons as fun). These awesome educational activities will have your little ones exploring crucial science, reading, and language arts concepts in short order. Oh, and did we mention that they’ll keep them totally entertained for hours, too? It’s an all-around win-win.
- Inspect Slides Under a Microscope – Collecting specimens is half the fun of this engaging rainy-day activity! Gather onion skins, spiderwebs, and even a strand of hair and then give them a gander using your kids’ microscope kit. This endlessly entertaining (and equally as educational) activity will help lay the foundation for scientific concepts of biology, microscopy, Earth sciences, and much more.
- Author a Book – Teach your budding J.K. Rowling or Dr. Seuss that anybody can be a writer with this activity. Ask all your kids to write a short story, play, or book based on a prompt you’ve provided (here are some brilliant prompt ideas). As part of the day’s arts and crafts component, you can have them paint, color, or draw the covers of their books.
- Conduct a Chemistry Experiment – Kids never forget the first time they made a volcano in science class, so why not do it at home, just for fun? The classic recipe calls for vinegar, water, dish soap, and food coloring—all things you probably have lying around the house already—and will encourage you to get crafty by building out the volcano out of papier-mâché, plaster, or clay. Your kids will love these lemon volcanoes too!
Rainy Day Games for Kids
Unbridled, pure fun: Nothing enhances a rainy day quite like it. There are so many fantastic ways to engage the whole family in fun and games on rainy days, whether you go full-on retro or high-tech and new. Encouraging teamwork, togetherness, and strategic thinking, these games also have a hidden learning component to appease parents, grandparents, and babysitters. Bonus points for the fact that they tend to keep kids’ attention for hours on end.
- Bust Out the Vintage Board Games – Your kids will be endlessly fascinated by old-school board games (you know, the ones that you don’t have to plug in). Whether you feature the classics like Clue, Monopoly, Sorry! or Risk or go for your personal childhood favorites like Hungry Hungry Hippos or Guess Who?, you can count on hours of laughs during board game time.
- Play a Round of Cards – Unless you’ve already taught them, there’s a pretty good chance that your youngsters know nothing about playing cards. There are lots of kids’ card games out there that are simple enough for even the youngest rainy day players.
- Create a Household Scavenger Hunt – Talk about making memories! Transform your house into a vessel for the hunt of a lifetime when you create a scavenger hunt at home. Hide small treasures throughout the house or stage several clues that lead to one main bounty.
Rainy Day Crafts
Encourage self-expression and foster concepts of creativity with some of the easy at-home arts and crafts projects listed below. Whether you’re looking to engage kids at finger painting age or pre-teens experimenting with identity, these creative activities will help engage the whole crew. Nothing’s off-limits when it comes to artsy creations. Performance art, visual art, music—it’s all game!
- Paint a Still Life – It goes without saying, but studies on landscape painting are probably off the table if it’s gross outside, but that doesn’t mean you can’t pull together some interesting subject matter indoors. Stage something colorful and eye-catching to paint, like fruit or an interesting grouping of vases, and invite your little ones to observe and create.
Things to do on a Rainy Day
- Put on a Play – Unleash your group’s performative potential by encouraging them to stage a play. Whether they write one themselves or follow a script of an all-time classic, they’ll have a blast serving as the star, writer, director, set designer, and costume designer. If you’ve got lots of rainy days in the forecast, break up the production activities into segments—writing, rehearsing, costume design, etc.
- Stage a Talent Show – If not everyone wants to showcase their acting or painting skills, consider staging a multi-discipline talent show where your youngsters can perform in any which way they’d like. Give them the morning to come up with and rehearse their act, and then make showtime sometime after lunch. Don’t forget to invite all the neighborhood kids to serve as audience members or participants, too.
Nothing compares to a day of fun in the sun, digging in the dirt or riding bikes, but these activities prove that the whole world is a playground if you want it to be. Designed to teach teamwork, communication, problem-solving, and foundational educational concepts, you’ll find that indoor games can be endlessly entertaining as well as beneficial to your child’s development. These awesome Rainy Day Activities for Kids will capture the attention of the whole family, with the added bonus of sweet memories your little ones will cherish for a lifetime!
PIN this list and come back to it as needed when there’s rain outside. How do you spend a Rainy Day?
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