5 Fresh Ideas for Creative Dog Days of Summer

June 29, 2017
By Beth Herrild

Easy Outdoor Creative Activities to Do With Your Kids This Summer

Summer is right around the corner. Here are 4 fresh ideas for those lazy, hazy days outside:

1. Back to the basics with sidewalk chalk. Good old fashioned sticks of sidewalk chalk can be lots of fun for kids. You don’t need to buy any of those fancy sprayers or kits, just let them draw. Then, introduce some games. The Pinterested Parent has some fun games & activities on her site. We have enjoyed hopscotch but we put letters in the squares instead of numbers, when you throw the rock you must go from the first letter through all of them, thinking up words that begin with each letter. One summer, I drew a chalk line down our street and numbered it from 1 through 144. Then the kids worked on their multiplication tables by jumping by 2s and then 3s, 4s etc.

2. Send the kids on a scavenger hunt. Draw color swatches on a piece of copy printer paper with a wide marker or crayon and send them outside to find things that are as close to those exact colors & shades as possible. If you don’t want them picking flowers and leaves, it works well to send them with a digital camera or phone to take photos of the objects. This can be a collaborative activity or a competition! It helps kids’ to develop their observation skills which are extremely important in our world today!

3. Send the kids outside to hunt for interesting rocks. When they come in with their treasures, you could have them sort the rocks by shape (like how many are shaped like hearts?) or type of rock (igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic?).

4. Play restaurant in your yard. When temperatures mount, we would always retreat to the yard and fill a big plastic tub or bucket with water from the hose. Then the kids would play that they were chefs at a restaurant and make “soup” in the tub by adding all sorts of weeds, flowers, dirt etc. and pretend to serve it to me! We even mocked up little restaurant order sheets at one point for them to write on and I bought inexpensive chef hats at a local toy store. This sounds like a simple activity, but it provided hours of fun!

5. What else do you do for fun with your kids during the lovely beautiful days of summer? Comment and share!