5 Activities Guaranteed To Get Your Kids Outside This Summer
No screens allowed!
School is officially out for summer for the next two months but living in 2017 means that your kids have unlimited things to play or watch indoors. If you don’t want your kids spending the whole summer sitting inside staring at screens, we have collected some great ideas for kids activities. All of them will get your kids out of the house for the day or maybe more!
A Real-Life Superhero Situation
When I was a kid, one of the greatest ways to spend a Saturday morning was to watch Batman: The Animated Series with a big bowl of cereal. I think I would have been over the moon if that cereal lead to the rescue of the World’s Greatest Detective. A great way to spend a day outside would be to set up a scavenger hunt themed around your kids’ favourite superhero. Start with a note detailing the capture of Batman, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman or Iron Man and let your kids figure out how to find them!
An example of a Batman scavenger hunt could be Mr. Freeze’s Frozen Fury. In this scenario, Mr. Freeze has kidnapped Batman. Two examples of activities within this adventure could be retrieving clues at the bottom of a very cold kiddie pool or bathtub (using a written clue in a ziplock bag with a hockey puck or weight to make it sink) or rescuing Batman from a block of ice (freeze Batman overnight using a Tupperware container). The possibilities for a superhero scavenger hunt are truly limitless!
Play Board Games on the Lawn
Three words that can get any kid (or parent) excited: giant board games.
There are several different options of games that can be played with varying levels of difficulty to set up. One of the most simple is Lawn Twister. Using an empty pizza box, you can create a template to spray paint on your lawn. Get four different colours, spray away, get your Twister spinner and you have a giant game of Twister ready to go!
With a little more work (and a trip to your local hardware store), you can create your own Yard Yahtzee set. Some of the other options for giant board games for the backyard include Giant Connect 4, Giant Jenga or Giant Kerplunk.
Go Berry or Apple Picking
With all of the great fruits and vegetables available during the summertime in Ontario, fruit picking is a great, tasty excursion for a day. In the beginning of the summer, you can pick lovely berries like strawberries or blueberries and pick apples in the late summer/early fall (in Ontario, some of the sweetest varieties of apples like Honeycrisp are only available in the later months of the year).
Once you have picked fruit, you can create a great dish with the kids to be able to enjoy in the backyard. Some of the great options include:
- Strawberry-Blueberry Shortcake Ice Cream Sandwiches
- Berries with Mascarpone
- Raspberry-Lemonade Spritzer
Water Balloon War
If you were lucky enough to have a water war when you were younger, you know how amazing it felt. Well, modern technology had made even the water balloon war even easier to pull off. The Zuru Bunch O’ Balloons is the quickest and easiest way to load up for war. You connect the device to your hose and within a minute, you will have one hundred water balloons ready to fire. The device is sold in Canada and goes for about thirteen dollars.
For a less costly outdoor team-based game, capture the flag is another option. All that you need for capture the flag is two flags and a way to delineate the teams. Divide a large space into two, set up the teams and start the game. Teams need to cross into enemy territory and return the enemy flag to their base without getting tagged to win.
Outdoor Movie Night
If all else fails, you could bring the screens that your kids love to the great outdoors. There are options for DIY solutions, but for under a hundred bucks, you can rent a screen and projector to be able to play your kids favourite movie(s) in the backyard.
If all else fails, a night at a drive-in movie theatre with the kids is another great option.
CC Image Courtesy of Scott Wylie via Flickr
