Ways to Spend A Rainy Weekend Inside with The Kids

Now the fall is upon us, the days of your kids being able to play in the garden all weekend are drawing to a close. There will still be opportunities for them to get out and enjoy themselves, even if it snows and they spend an hour or two building snowmen and having snowball fights. Inevitably though, you’ll need to be ready for the increasing likelihood that you will have some bored children stuck indoors as it pours with rain outside.

Preparing your home for indoor play

If you’ve got kids spending most of their time inside, you’ll want to get everything as clean and tidy as possible beforehand. This might sound counter-intuitive, tidying up just before the kids start making a mess; but if you clear everything out of the way and make sure their rooms are tidy there’ll be less likelihood that the clutter will start to pile up. They will have no excuse for not putting things away or making a mess just trying to find a particular toy or game, and you’ll be able to keep things up together more easily. It’s also worth having a thorough clean to make sure there are no dust kitties or cobwebs anywhere, as an inventive indoor game of hide and seek will soon turn your kids into human dusters! Give the carpets a good clean too, using local carpet cleaners who can give your floor a deep clean and make sure they’re more hygienic for the kids to roll around on.

Play ideas

As mentioned above, hide and seek can be a surprisingly fun indoor game, because it forces the participants to be inventive. Setting a time limit for each search can avoid the problem of there being too few hiding places, as the searcher will only have a few minutes to guess which of the possible spots their friends or siblings are hiding in. If your kids love arts and crafts, spreading out a large waterproof sheet on a table or even the floor and letting them go to town with paints, glitter, and glue will keep them occupied for hours. As long as the area is large enough to contain their activities, you should only have minimal amounts of cleaning up to do. You can even task them with a project such as creating your family tree. This can be a fun afternoon activity that sees them researching through old newspaper archives to discover your family lineage, and kids love discovering if they were related to royalty or someone famous. Pillow fights can be fun as long as they take place somewhere where nothing can be knocked over and broken, and the kids can’t fall onto anything hard. If they like dressing up, they could create a play to perform in front of you. There are also plenty of quieter activities they can get stuck into, such as coloring and activity books, comics and magazines, jigsaw puzzles, and board games. On a particularly stormy day, for example, making popcorn or a batch of brownies and watching a movie can feel like a real treat.

If you’re short of things to do on a rainy weekend, you’ll find lots more ideas by browsing online, so your kids don’t need to be bored when the winter weather sets in.

Kelly Tate