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family fun guide |
Quick And Fun Projects
Web Exclusive
- Make a detailed map of your house and yard, based on accurate measurements.
- Put on a treasure hunt for each other.
- Practice some magic tricks and put on a magic show.
- Invite the neighborhood over for a circus. Make costumes, dress the
dog up as a lion, place a tightrope on the floor, practice juggling...
use your imagination!
- On a windy day, make a kite and fly it.
- On a warm day, wash the car. Offer to wash the neighbor's car.
- Make boats from wood scraps and corks, with paper or fabric sails,
and sail them down a creek.
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- Play store with your children's toys and paper money.
- Play restaurant, writing up a menu of the day's lunch offerings.
- Learn a new language together, with tapes or CD-ROMs. Use index cards
to label items around the house in the new language.
- Celebrate a holiday from another country, like Bastille Day or St.
Brighid's Day. Research the holiday, make traditional foods, and listen
to music from that country.
- Do crossword puzzles.
- Do origami.
- Trace around your child's body on a long sheet of newsprint, and let
him color in his face and clothing.
- Decorate each other's faces with face paints.
- Paint on each other's tummies or arms with watercolors. Then take a
bubble bath together!
- Using a parachute or sheet, have children hold the edges and bounce
a ball on it, get under it, or ride on it as adults hold onto the edges
and walk around.
- Enjoy the old pastime of visiting. Visit artists, craftspeople, musicians,
or inventors.
- Make a trip to a home for elderly people in your community.
- Polish your silverware or pots. Use lemon juice and salt for copper;
silver polish for silver.
- Bake bread. Children will love kneading it, letting it rise, punching
it down, smelling it bake, and eating it!
- Finger paint with shaving cream.
- Cut paper dolls and clothing from catalogues.
- Make macaroni jewelry: Mix food coloring in rubbing alcohol, and stir
in uncooked macaroni. Let it dry and string it on yarn for bracelets and
necklaces.
- Make seed necklaces: Dye dried melon seeds in food coloring mixed with
water. Let them dry, and string them together with a needle and thread.
- Make flower arrangements with pipe cleaner stems and colored tissue
or construction paper flowers.
- Plant a vegetable or flower garden together.
- Force paperwhite or amaryllis bulbs indoors.
- Start some seeds indoors. Stick four toothpicks in a potato or avocado
pit and suspend it halfway in a jar of water. Plant orange and lemon seeds
in a little potting soil in eggshells. Put them in a sunny window, and
watch them germinate.
- Grow a tray of bean or alfalfa sprouts, or wheatgrass--then eat them
for good health!
- Make a felt board, covering a piece of cardboard with a felt background,
and cutting animals, shapes, or letters out of felt to stick on it. (This
felt board is a great game for the car.)
- Write letters to relatives, and take a trip to the post office to find
out how the mail gets delivered.
- Start a stamp collection.
- Start a neighborhood food drive, and deliver canned goods to a local
church or social service agency.
- Set out birdseed and a birdbath, and watch the birds gather.
- Fill walnut shell halves with candle wax and a tiny wick. Light them
around the garden or on a pond at night for a magical scene.
- Research your family tree, gathering information from relatives, libraries,
and the Internet.
- Have each family member write an autobiography, illustrated with photos
and drawings of themselves.
- Take turns bringing a favorite passage from a book or poem to dinner.
Copy them into a blank book to save.
- Write and illustrate a children's book to give to a friend or relative.
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