Rainy days can be fun days with creative indoor play ideas. When the fall weather is too bad to go outside, your kids can still enjoy themselves inside with these five fun activities.
- Take an Imaginary Camping Trip
Camping doesn’t have to be outdoors. You can make a tent in your own home with chairs and blankets. An indoor camping trip can be an exciting way to spend the morning, even in a small apartment. Make sure you bring plenty of snacks, flashlights, and books. You can even build an igloo and go on a polar bear hunt or an ice fishing expedition. Bring warm clothes to make sure you don’t freeze at the North Pole!
- Reuse and Recycle
A rainy fall day is the perfect moment to do some earth-friendly crafts. Collect broken crayons from around the house, remove the paper wrappers, oil a muffin pan, and put the crayons in a warm oven (with adult supervision) until they melt. You can even help kids sort the broken pieces into different groups for exciting color effects. Once the discs have cooled, they will pop easily out of the tin. These rainbow crayons are ideal for colorful fall pictures.
- Build a Theater at Home
You don’t have to leave the house to enjoy a visit to the movie theater. With a little creativity, you can make a theater in your own living room. Set up comfortable pillows and chairs for the family to sit in. Dim the lights for an authentic theater experience. Don’t forget to pop the popcorn and pour some favorite beverages. A classic cartoon or a family favorite can make a rainy afternoon fly by.
- Mix Learning and Fun
Rainy days are good opportunities to mix learning and fun. Do you have lots of old catalogs and magazines around your house? Get them out and have your kids discover pictures of specific foods, animals, or vehicles. With glue sticks and safety scissors, they can make collages and learn about all the different varieties that can be found.
- Get Crafty
When it’s too cold or wet to play outdoors, kids love to do elaborate craft projects inside. With modeling beeswax or clay, they can make models of their favorite animals, trees, and other items found in nature. They can also make clay or wax models of buildings, people, or even whole cities. Rainy fall weather means that the holidays aren’t far off, and beeswax crafts make perfect gifts for Grandma and Grandpa. Let your kids use their imagination as they choose their favorite colors and figures.
I love all of these. An imaginary camping trip would be fun (and there’s no bugs or bears like the real deal 😉 ).
You bring back childhood memories with mention of the theater. We used to do that with clothesline and sheets!
All great ideas. I am not as crafty as I wish I was, but I like the “camping trip” idea a lot.
Fantastic ideas. Really fun activities.
We do “home theater” night all the time. We don’t call it movie night. It’s so nice to get all super snug with the family and watch a great flick together.
What great activities for the kids. I use to always look for fun things to do inside in MN especially in the winter when I did not have a car.
Indoor camping is the BEST! It’s just an all night party of movies, video games, board games, and laughing. It’s awesome.
We love making home theaters full of big pillows and sheets all over. Great idea.
Crafts are my favorite things to do with kids when the weather isn’t so hot. It’s a great way to interact with them and teach them something.
I always loved doing arts and crafts with my kids when it was too cold or nasty to go outside. One of our favorites was water colors.
These are all great ideas. Being stuck inside can be fun! Building forts, reading, and doing crafts are all what we enjoy.
These are all great rainy day activities. We used to go camping in the living room complete with tent and a campfire on the TV.
What fantastic ideas! We do the indoor camping from time to time and did it a lot when my son was younger!
These are awesome ideas! Love the indoor camping idea!
These are all great ideas!!! I think I may use #1 for Christmas!
Oh, I really love the idea of an indoor camping trip! It’s been way too long since we’ve made a pillow fort!
I try to keep a list of things for rainy days too! I love crafting with the kids!
These are some really creative ideas! Indoor camping is such a cute activity. I feel like you could combine it with the home theater idea and have a really cozy and fun night
We used to do a lot of crafts when the kids were little. It was always fun watching them be so creative. These are all great tips for keeping kids busy.
When the weather gets crappy here in MI, we do a lot of crafts inside. We have forts, movie nights, and we even have a play kitchen down in the basement and kiddo will cook for us 😉 Although, that is starting to be less and less as she would prefer to cook real food now.
These are such great ideas! We love game time and movie time!
This is a great list with fund ideas. We home school so we are always looking for new things to do.
Oh my the camping trip sounds like so much fun. Thanks for sharing these great ideas. I’m going to add them to our fall to do list!
Thanks for these wonderful activities! When it starts getting cooler in the fall, it’s hard to distract the kids when they can’t play outside as often as they’d like!
These are great activities! My kids will love them.
When it gets cold here I usually bring in some of the kids’ outdoor toys and let them play in our dining room. Great ideas!
It’s that time of year again when being indoors is an all day thing…. I love these ideas. We get crafty a lot during the winter. We also play a lot of games – both board games and made up active games like hide-and-seek.
we love to get crafty here on rainy days. Great ideas I’ll refer back too.
My son will probably just sit around play video games and watch TV. That is enough to make him happy
OMG building a theatre in the home is a great idea. Make movies nights feel more realistic in the comfort of home!
What fun ideas! We’re building a home family theater now!