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.
• 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.