30 unique activities for families to enjoy, building quality time with each other.
Creating quality family time is crucial to the development of children. It helps to build self-esteem, positive connections, morals, and bonds that will last a lifetime. It is often difficult to think of new and creative ways to entertain your children that does not cost a lot of money. Below are some great tips your family can all engage in for quality time that is low cost and fun for the whole family. The best way to start new family traditions and activities and to keep them successful and to begin with an element of structure, allow for the family to decide how they want to spend their time together. Give 3-5 options for them to vote on and pick. Make sure there is time for the entire family to help set up and always have each member involved in the work. Allow your children to decide what tasks they want to be responsible for and what each member of the team will be doing. It is always a good idea to allow your children to do the brain-storming while you get the activity set up (gathering supplies, prepping space). You can offer scrap paper and a pencil to your children so they can begin to draw/write out their idea to help them stay focused.
1. Make a modern Countdown Calendar. Countdown calendars are traditionally related to the Christian holiday of Christmas. These calendars will count down the 24 days till Christmas. As a modern twist, this Countdown calendar can be created to count down the days till the New Year. Fill it with inspirational sayings and quotes to prepare for the New Year that is filled with quality time with friends and family. Creating this Countdown calendar can be fun and low cost. The basic required materials for this calendar are pockets or doors numbered 1 thru 35 and inside these are phrases or small trinkets reflecting the holiday. The last door often has a extra special trinket like a chocolate bar. A quick and easy calendar is to take envelopes to create a scene like a tree or a home. Put the 35th envelope in the center and make this one larger than the rest. You can also use paper and staple/tape the sides to create your own quick and easy advent calendar in your home. Talk to your family and encourage them to create their own design and way of making this. Using problem solving skills and creative thought processes builds on our children’s protective factors and increases confidence and self-esteem. In adults, it helps to reduce stress which can lower blood pressure.
2. Create Holiday Cards with your family. Kids love to make and give gifts. Help inspire creativity, learn about sharing, thanks, and the holiday season with home-made holiday cards. With your family together, have your children think about the cards they want to send. Who do the y want to send them to, what do they want to say on their cards. As you are gathering supplies and prepping the space you can talk with them about: When are times we send cards to people? What do cards usually say? How do people feel when they receive a card? Not only is this a great way to stir creative thinking it also helps the child begin to understand about empathy and how their behavior impacts others. To prepare the space, get any size paper, stickers, pens, markers, crayons, glue, and scissors out. Place in piles. Think about the ages of your children who will use the supplies to ensure it is safe. For kids who are younger, 0-5, encourage free scribbling with crayons that can be framed in a piece of paper and added to the card once it is finished. This can also be used as the background for the front of the card and the older kids can add stickers and cutouts of their own designs to go on top. Fold construction paper in half or quarters to create a card, see template. Glue the image onto the front section of the card and write a nice note or saying in the inside. For more personalized fun, have your kids create their own “stamp” for the back of the card.
3. Get in the festive holiday spirit; sing Christmas carols, karaoke style. Singing is a great way to bring friends and families together. Whether it is gathering around to sing to songs on the radio, or having a karaoke CD and taking turns performing. Sing alone or even in a group can increase endorphins that are the positive building blocks in the brain. It makes us feel good, and can protect us from things that make us sick. For kids who are younger, 0-5, hold them while you sing and encourage them to dance with the music. Remember, children have greater sensitive to sound and noise, ensure that the music is at a comfortable volume for all to enjoy.
4. Make imprints of the beautiful fall leaves. Fall is such a beautiful time of year. The temperature begins to get cooler, making it the perfect time for walks in nature. Try taking a walk with your family and friends, while on your path gather different kinds of leaves in a bag. When you return home you can easily place the leaf on a hard surface with a sheet of paper on top. Take a crayon or pencil and rub over the sheet of paper, holding down the leaf. Watch as the leaf underneath magically reveals on the page. Try this with different colors and placements on the page to create a beautiful piece of fall art. Creating these prints is a great opportunity to begin a discussion about the leaf’s prints and the prints we make on our environment or others. You can start this discussion with, look at the picture that is created; if there was a picture of you what do you think they would put in the print to represent you?
5. Bake cookies. Baking is a great bonding experience between parent and child. This bonding is so important because it connects multiple memory pathways, to create protective factors for a child. Baking also, helps build skills in following directions, planning, focus, and reading. To ensure success, find a recipe that has less than 10 ingredients.
6. Have a family game night. Games are a great way to share experiences and create healthy positive relationships. Encourage team work during the game.
7. Make Placemats for Holiday Dinners. Making placemats can be easy and fun way for your kids to be a part of your holiday traditions. Get a large piece of paper or construction paper as the placemat. You can use any material to create an image to embellish the mat try: crayons, markers, and stickers. You can even create images on a separate piece of paper or get leaves/photos to glue onto the mat. When done, use packaging tape to seal the place mat. Encourage your kids to make one for themselves and other family members and friends coming to dinner. For younger children, try getting pre-cut images out and letting them place the pictures on the mat. Adult supervision may be required when gluing. Creating art is a great way for kids to build resiliency, it helps them to use their creativity, problem solve, increases self-esteem, and helps them to begin in creating a sense of self.
8. Play Charades. Playing Charades is a no-cost way to get your family laughing and playing together. Laughing encourages Steve Wilson, MA, CSP, a psychologist and laugh therapist was quoted in a WebMD.com article on the benefits of laughter, "The effects of laughter and exercise are very similar," says Wilson. "Combining laughter and movement, like waving your arms, is a great way to boost your heart rate."
9. Create a dream house for your family. This activity is sure to get your family talking and creating a shared vision and goal for your family. Drawing a group image really shows the family dynamic. Use this opportunity to create a conversation with your family about the house each would want and how does each person create that perfect house. Honor your kids creativity, (there may be no budget or space for a disco room filled with an aquarium on the ceiling, but try to look at what your kids are really saying with that, are they really just wanting a space of their own, places they can have fun. See how you can create compromises in building relationships and family time, through the images they create. To start this project lay out a large sheet of paper and colored pencils/crayons. Explain the purpose of this project is for everyone to work on one piece of paper to create a dream house for the entire group to live in. Talk about each person part in the drawing and how everyone wants the picture to look.
10. Make Snow Flakes. Snowflakes are easy to create and fun to hang up and decorate with. Take a sheet of paper and fold it into multiple times into even halves. Take scissors and begin cutting parts off, unfold and see what you create. No two snowflakes are alike. What are the things each person in the family that makes them similar and different?
11. Drink Hot Cocoa/Apple Cider and look at the festive holiday lights. Hot Cocoa and Hot Cider packets are pretty inexpensive, you can purchase a box for a dollar in some stores. Whether it is driving downtown or getting the newspaper to see where the lights are in neighborhoods around the city. This is a low cost way to create a tradition of shared experiences. Shared experiences are important in bonding and building lasting relationships.
12. Make Place-cards for Holiday Dinners. Making place-cards is another easy craft kids get excited about as they get to take ownership over a traditional family meal. Raisesmartkids.com, explains the importance of art and using both sides of the brain. “It appears that for the brain to be efficient, the two hemispheres of the brains must work together. By stimulating and exercising the right hemisphere of the brain, the arts strengthen the connection between the hemispheres.” Using creativity and the emotional expressiveness that art inhabits are all what we consider right brain tasks. Logical thinking is considered left brain. When we encourage our kids to create and implement their ideas then both brains work together to creatively problem solve and build a work of art. Describe to your child what a place-card holder is, if you have some, show them a few examples. Then while you prep the space, getting the supplies set up, have your child brain-storm ideas of what they would like their place-card holder to look like. Help them think through this, is this going to be able to stand up on their own? Is it really complicated to put together and the child will lose interest before multiple holders are created. Encourage simple design structure with few pieces. Here is an example, take a pinecone and with tissue paper (less messy and most structured for kids who may have some attention problems or gets wound up very quickly) paint, or glitter glue embellish the pinecone to look like a winter wonderland tree. Try using white out for the snow. You can create a star at the top with 2 pieces of paper to hold the place card. Add cotton balls on the bottom to create an effect of snow.
13. Sew a quilt from some of your favorite old clothes. Sew can be meditative and fun. Sewing helps to relax the mind and body, and often opens ourselves up for conversations around us. Being able to repurpose our favorite articles of clothing that may not fit us anymore or does not work with our style is a great way to get the family together for a group project. A needle and thread can be relatively inexpensive, often finding small sewing kits for a dollar in most discount stores. Have all members of the family bring out old clothes they do not want, old blankets or sheets that are tattered/torn or that you do not use anymore, and any fabric you may have laying around the house. Out of a piece of paper create a template square. You will use this to cut all of your squares. Adults and older children can cut squares and begin creating a pile. Using your threaded needle, put 2 squares together on one end and sew them together. Each member of the family can create their own larger quadrants that will be connected at the end. Continue connecting to maintain a square shape. See example below. Once all the patches are connected, press seams with an iron. Measure the size of this or take to your local fabric store. Match a fleece backing to this for a warm blanket the whole family can take pride in.
14. Create a Tree of Thanks, Make hand prints of all of the visitors in your home and how you connect with them. Create a home of grace and mindfulness all year long. Mindfulness, is the self-regulation of attention with an attitude of openness, curiosity and acceptance (Bishop et al., 2004). A great tradition to create is to have all visitors to your home trace their hand on paper, and write one thing about their visit, how they are connected to your family, or an inspirational quote. Create a tree base with paper grocery bags turned inside out. Cut the bags open to lay flat and stack around each other to get the size you want. Draw with a pencil the size you want and cut. Have your children help you by drawing the tree or holding the paper flat and still as you draw. Get a stack of colored paper and have pencil and scissors handy (in a safe place) for guest. Start your tree by helping each member of the family trace his/her hand prints and cut their hands out. Have them write one important thing to them on the hand. Place the hands around the tree trunk to give the illusion of a tree. As guests come by this holiday season have them also create hands and fill the tree.
15. Make a Joke/Poem night. Margaret Edgington highlights the importance of risk taking with children, “Learning to cope with risk and to accept challenges is a vital part of human development and learning. Those who have been denied this learning will not have the resources to cope with, and retain control of, their lives. Early years practitioners have a duty to offer children the chance to engage with risk and challenge within a well-managed context, which promotes a ‘have a go’ attitude, and to help others to understand how competent young children can be and how well they respond to being trusted with responsibility” (www.teachingexpertise.com). Standing in front of a crowd, even your family, satisfies that need for risk taking in developing children. Invite friends and neighbor to enhance the fun. Have each person stand up and tell a joke, or read a poem, maybe tell a funny story that happened to them. Your kids can have fun creating a curtain and stage. Try borrowing using sheets, blankets, curtains stapled to the wall as a stage backdrop and cardboard for the stage. You can create a microphone out of the cardboard center of the paper towel roll.
16. Make sock puppets. Have socks that seem to lose their match every time they get out of the dryer? Create fun characters out of those lost soles. Creating sock puppets is easy and inexpensive and allows for you and your child to use their creativity to develop a world in which these characters live in. Developing magical worlds and fantasies helps children build importance protective factors that shield them from stress and develop a more positive perspective when faced with trauma.
17. Volunteer. Volunteers predominantly express a sense of achievement and motivation, and this is ultimately generated from your desire and enthusiasm to help(www.worldvolunteerweb.org).You can find lots of ways to volunteer at www.volunteerflorida.org.
18. Go on a scavenger hunt. Take your family out on a walk around the neighborhood or drive around town to find this list of great holiday fun items.
m Holly bush m Snowman
m Mistletoe m Snowflakes
m Menorah m Stockings
m Dreidel m Santa Claus
m Kinara m Kaftans
m Evergreen Tree m Scarf
m Mittens m Icicle
m Sled mIce Skates
19. Take the family to a local holiday event. During the holidays there are always opportunities for families to get together and enjoy their town’s celebration. Many of these events are free or low cost. Shared experiences are a great way for the family to bond and create positive, lasting memories.
20. Read a story together. www.earlymoments.com provides 10 reasons why reading is so important to children. Some reasons listed are to increase communication skills, attention, and speech.
21. Take time to learn about your family, traditions they had, where your ancestors are from. Try to adopt one new tradition from your family’s heritage. “You can’t know where you are going until you know where you’ve been” – Hitch. Our heritage is our roots, where we came from. These crucial aspects to our culture and helps us in identifying who we are. Mentalhelp.net explains social development in terms of self identity at various ages: “During early childhood, children start to develop a "self-concept," the attributes, abilities, attitudes and values that they believe define them.” This concept of self will be the bases for growth as the child grows and begins to seek validation outside the concrete visual to identify who he/she is. Developing a strong sense of culture and heritage in your child is a great way to ingrain the important principles of self into the child and preserve these morals and values as children age.
22. Make a Holiday Dinner Centerpiece. Creating a holiday centerpiece is another great art idea for kids to get involved in the traditions of the holiday season. Creating art stimulates our minds to increase fine motor skills, creative thinking, and attention/focus. Art also reduces anxiety, depression, and increases our self esteem. For an easy centerpiece with things you can find mostly around the house. Try this out.
Materials
Paper Milk Carton
Sticks, some with lots of branches attached or pipe cleaners
Pinecones
Batting/cotton balls
Scraps of fabric or string
Tissue paper/paper/magazine/newspaper
Paint (optional)
Hot Glue (be careful have adult use)
Marshmallows
Plastic wrap
A small can or plastic lid (to make a pond)
To begin, get a clean paper milk carton and turn it on its side. Expand the spout so that it is a perfect rectangle. At the open end, cut along the seams to cut off the top portion so that you have a long trough to work with. On open end, cut the bottom seam closes to you till you reach the main body of the carton; this should be about 4 inches long. Repeat on both sides. Fold the cut flaps inward and the bottom flap on top of this, glue. You should now have a vessel to work with. Measure from bottom 1 inch on both side pieces and draw a line across. Cut out each side piece above the line, leaving a one inch border and the front and back pieces still intact. With the template provided, trace along back side of vessel and cut out background. Repeat in front. Let you kids take turns to color the background and cutting down the paper to decorate the outside. The outside should be decorated to get a consistent look and reinforce the seams to make it stronger. This can be done by painting (this can be messy and often will loosen kids up if they are not properly structured), or gluing torn piece of paper (tissue paper, newspaper, or magazines). This should be done randomly like a decoupage. Let dry. You can decorate the snowflakes with white out to give them a frosty look. While the carton is drying, you can begin to make the figures. Use pinecones as evergreen trees, sticks/pipe cleaners for reindeer, and marshmallows for snowman. See below.
Reindeer
Take small sticks and connect them in the form of a reindeer. Add a stick with multiple branches to the top for the horns. You can also use pipe cleaners and mold them into the form is you desire. Have an adult hot glue the pieces together. With twine, or small scraps torn from fabric, begin wrapping the reindeer to give it a uniform look. Use a small dot of Elmer’s glue to adhere the ends of the twine.
Trees
To create trees get multiple sizes of pinecones. You can leave them as is, or add spruces of pine needles for authentic look and white out or cotton balls/batting for snow.
Snowman
Take 3 marshmallows and glue them on top of one another. Find orange and back photos in the magazine to glue on for the snow man’s face, if you have googly eyes, this will work to. Cardboard could make a good snow man nose as well. Use sticks to create the arms.
Ice Skating Pond
For an advance option you can tightly fit plastic wrap over a 3-5 inch diameter plastic lid. Try using pipe cleaners or folded up magazines to create the skaters.
Once everything is dry, they are ready to assemble. Place your objects in your winter wonderland and glue to the bottom on the carton. Place unraveled cotton balls or batting around the figures and even on the figure to make it look like a fresh snow fall.
23. Write your own Holiday story about your family. Encourage your kids to create their own story about their family during the holidays. What are some of the unique things your family does? What is a lesson to be learned from the holiday this year? Telling stories is a great way to process real things that happen and also is a great way to just create a fun imaginative world and fosters creativity, and logic skills.
24. Spend time learning and talking about gratitude, what were the best things that happened this year? Having a positive perspective and seeing things for what is good is the best resiliency factor you can have. Teach your kids early about creating a good perspective and looking at the blessings in life. Have each member talk about a good thing that has happened this year. This is a great way to begin a family meal together.
25. Use the leftover wrapping paper to create a festive collage/piece of art. Art is everywhere and can be created out of anything. Have an old box? Paper? Try ripping up wrapping paper and gluing it down to create a fun collage, see what else is around to make this collage truly unique.
26. Get outside and have a family sporting event. Getting outside and moving around with your family is a great way to relax, burn energy, and get your mind and body feeling good and at it optimal performance. Try taking a walk with your family or organizing a fun obstacle course for your family to compete in. You can find a lot of great activities for little to no cost. Try these fun activities you can run between and complete to see who finishes first:
Begin with Dizzy Spin
Get a baseball bat to hover over or close your eyes and spin 5 times in a circle before running to the next activity.
Tire Maze
Line up hula hoops to run through like the tires athletes run through in training.
Can Toss
get clean and empty soda cans, stack on top of each other to create a pyramid, toss a small ball or bean bag at it to topple over.
Hopscotch
Have each person throw a pebble on one of the spaces and jump through a hopscotch game.
Limbo
String a rope between 2 chairs, limbo underneath without bending over, you are almost to the finish!
Stilt walk
Using old soup cans and string, create stilts by creating small holes at the bottom on the can and tying string through it twice to make a foot hole and then make sure the string is long enough you can hold on to the ends. Set up chairs/stools/ottomans around to make an obstacle course out of it.
Jump Rope
Have each person jump rope counting out loud 10 times while singing a song. Now run to the finish.
Come up with your own obstacle course or even a carnival. Your kids will have fun creating their own booths.
27. Make a calendar for the New Year, include fun family activities each week to do. This art task is a fun way for kids to learn how to structure and organize time. This can be done in several different ways. Like Calendar Books, you can have the page set up by the day, week, month, or even year. You can easily make month headings and just write important things to do under each with the date or create a calendar with boxes for each day and write in the important dates.
28. Create a game out of stories each family member creates. This game allows for your family and friends to be able to use creativity while sharing in experiences. While, sitting with your family and friends explain the game rules and choose who will start. Play will continue clockwise.
Rules
Each person will tell a story using 5 objects in the space around them. The story can be as long as they want and others will listen and count the number of objects they use that are in their space. When they are done telling the story, the next person will begin. No 2 people can use the same objects. It gets very challenging to go last and try and find new objects that have not been used yet. After everyone tells their story, they vote on who told the best story. You can vote on many different types of stories: scariest, funniest, weirdest, truest, or come up with your own category.
Create and Share your New Years’ Resolutions with your family. Have each member of the family write and/or draw their resolution for the New Year. For kids explain what New Years’ means, a time to start over, a new beginning, a chance for us to change and grow. Write down one thing you would do if you could change anything about yourself. Follow up with what is one thing one thing you want to do this next year that could make you a better person. Give examples of your own resolutions, stop smoking, lose weight, be more active, and spend more quality time with family. Setting goals and sharing those goals with others is a great way to ensure completion of the goal and help motivate your child for success (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (2011) Volume: 47, Issue: 6, Publisher: Elsevier Inc., Pages: 1291-1294).
