A collection of rainy day homemade activities to do with your children:

Here are a few rainy day activities for those days when the weather has you cooped up indoors:

FLAT PEOPLE

Draw people and animals on cardstock.  Snip small slits into the bottom and slide onto a piece of a toilet roll tube to stand them up.

PAPER DOLLS

Cut your doll out of cardstock or thin but sturdy cardboard.  Jazz her up with your Sharpies.  For clothing, trace the body of the doll onto a colourful page of a magazine.  I like to use the LCBO’s Food and Drink magazines for this kind of thing.  The pages are sturdy, glossy and beautiful.  Cut out your shirt, skirt, etc.,  adding tabs at the shoulders and sides as you cut.  Use your Sharpies again to draw on the details like buttons, bows, zippers, polka-dots…

MATCHING GAME WITH RANDOM OBJECTS

I LOVE this activity because you can pull it together anywhere in just a few minutes.  Gather up a few random objects from around your kitchen, or toy-room, wherever you happen to be, and trace them on a piece of paper.  Ta-da…instant matching game.  How simple is that?  We make up several at a time, and the Hooligans trade them around.  Honestly – so simple and they LOVE this activity.

POP-SCOTCH

Cut squares of bubble wrap and number them with paint or a sharpie.  Lay them out on the floor (a great opportunity to work on number ordering), and hop & pop away!

FISHING

I found this idea over at Counting Coconuts (a gorgeous blog by a Montessori Mom, chock-full of fabulous ideas for play and learning).  Her fish are sewn with love, and have spots on them for counting.  I was a little more hurried, and didn’t sew or spot my fish, so ours isn’t a counting exercise – just an activity that calls upon the Hooligans’ patience and co-ordination.  I whipped mine up quickly with cardboard and scrapbook paper, punched a hole in the nose end, and inserted a coated paperclip.  I bent the clips in a wonky kind of way so the kids would be able to snag them with their fishing rods.  Our fishing rods are drumsticks with a piece of wool tied on.  We attached a rubber band to the end of the wool to serve as a “hook”

CARDBOARD BACKDROP

CARDBOARD BACKDROP

  We opened up a cereal box and painted the inside panels and one of the older after-school Hooligans painted the panels with several colours of acrylic paint.  The paint dries quickly but you can speed up the process with a hairdryer.  I used sharpies to draw on all the details, and my 11 year old coloured it all in using crayola markers and pencil crayons.   It’s the perfect backdrop for playing Polly Pockets or Little People.  The possibilities are endless here; we call this one “Main Street”, but you could do a farm backdrop, seaside, jungle etc.

I love ideas like this – simple materials providing lots of opportunity for imagination and creativity.  Please let us know what you do when the weather keeps you inside.