Eight Indoor Activities for Rainy Days
The rain inevitably comes with those wet and miserable days where it’s tough to get out of your jammies. While sometimes I’m all about getting the gear on and finding puddles to jump in, some days you just want to stay cozy. Never fear! There are lots of indoor activities for rainy days that keep kids entertained and even offer Mom a few minutes of peace.
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Here are a few of my favourite indoor activities for rainy days!
Trace Yourself
Get out the big paper roll, lie the kids down and trace around them. Masking tape the paper to the ground and let them colour themselves with all their favourite things or what they’d like in their tummy. Offering a large space to decorate usually keeps it all on the paper and the kids find it hilarious to have a drawing as large as they are.
Masking Tape Madness
A roll of masking or painters tape goes a long way. Give the kids free reign to create a maze, hopscotch or a “balance beam” to walk on. They’ll go through the whole roll of tape but will love creating their own games and designing the room their way.
Toilet Roll Tubes
Gravity can be fascinating. Save up your empty toilet and paper towel rolls and tape them to the wall pointing down towards one another. Find some pom poms or cotton balls and let the kids watch them travel down the tubes. Use painters tape so your walls don’t get damaged and kids can move the tubes around to make their own patterns and race their pom poms.
Recycling Box Raid
Scissors, more tape, your blue recycling box and yellow paper recycling bag. Assuming everything in your recycling is fairly clean, let the kids choose containers or cardboard boxes to cut up and create with. Towers, robots and random formations are a great way to reuse yogurt containers while practicing scissor skills and using yet more tape!
Toy Wash
Water always entertains. Ask the kids to choose some toys that wouldn’t ordinarily get brought into the bath like Lego or cars and give the toys a wash. The job of “cleaning” the toys keeps kids busy, the bathtub keeps them contained and you can skip the bath before bedtime.
Treasure Hunt
Choose ten toys, lay them out and take a picture. Then send the kids into their rooms while you hide the items. If they forget what they’re looking for reference the photo but otherwise let them search while you giggle at how close they are without quite getting it!
Fairy Garden
Painting rocks is cheap, easy and fun. Pretty pictures, or kind messages, rocks are always a delight to pass on a walk. Kids love to revisit their art too. If you want to take it a step further, create a fairy garden. You just need some rocks, pinecones, and a little magic.
Dance Party
When I’m out of ideas, we turn up the speakers and ask Alexa for a 90s dance mix. The kids love jumping around and it tires all of us out. Dance parties got me through a lot of lockdown afternoons when my brain was numb but my body had a few moves left!
If you’ve made your way through this list and it’s not even lunchtime, take a deep breath, give yourself a break and offer up some screentime. Rain happens, lazy days happen and a 25 minute episode is sometimes enough for a hot cup of coffee and an opportunity to recharge your enthusiasm. Then, skip straight to dance party.
