Free and Fun Summer Activities For Kids

{Thursday's By Tara} - A Thursday ritual. A featured post written by Tara; simple, special, extraordinary moments in soaping and life.

25 Free (or cheap) and Fun activities to entertain your kids this summer!
1.  Visit a local library and pick up a calendar of the children’s activities for the summer.
2.  Bake cookies and deliver them to a local fire station, they are usually more than happy to give the kids a quick tour and even let them sit in the fire truck.
3.  Take a swim in the local pool or splash park.  These place usually only charge a few dollars for a whole day of fun and leave you with tired kids.
4.  Make homemade play dough.
5.  Hook up a cheap garden sprinkler in the yard for hours of fun.
6.  Play at the local park.
7.  Have a theme day (ex. Wacky Wednesday).
8.  See a Dollar movie almost all theatres have the promotion going over the summer).
9.  Make a fort in the living room and pretend to be pirates, explorers, or even knights.
10.  Have PJ day.  Watch movies, eat popcorn, and most importantly stay in the those PJ’s all day!
11.  Bake a cake or cookies!  My kids love to bake with mom (or dad).
12.  VOLUNTEER!  Whether it’s the local food bank, a clothes closet, or at the local animal shelter you will leave feeling awesome and will have taught the kids an important lesson.
13.  Connect with other moms and plan fun days at each other’s houses.
14.  Be a tourist in your own town and go to a museum or park that you have never been to.

We visited a local science museum that we had never been to.  My boys loved getting to try out all of the experiments and hands on activities.
15.  Have a water balloon fight.
16.  Drive-in theatre (if you have one near you, they are cheap and so much fun for the kids).
17.  Freeze dance (play music and dance like crazy, when the music stops the last one dancing is out).
18.  Make a dream book.  Using magazines, let the children cut out photographs and draw pictures of things they’d like to have someday, places they’d like to go, careers they’d like to have one day and glue them into a dream book.  
19.  Make your own Popsicles.
20.  Jump rope.
21.  Join a summer reading program at your library or at Borders, Barnes & Noble.
22.  Have a scavenger hunt around the house.  Just make a list of things that you each have to find and the first one to collect all the items gets to pick the next activity.
23.  Go bowling.  Places like AMF offer free bowling for kids over the summer.

This is my oldest son at one of our first bowling trips. We used our free passes and all 3 kids bowled for free that day.
24.  Have a spelling bee at home.  Let the kids show off some new words they learned in school this year!
25.  Most importantly HAVE FUN!
I love to just take it easy and enjoy the free time with my kids over the summer. Stay up late and sleep in. And, remember to take a day or two to do absolutely nothing, just let the kids run wild and use their imaginations! If you're really brave and want to try all of these here’s an idea. Print out the list and cut each thing out. Then put them in a jar and have the kids pick a new one each day and that’s what they get to do!
So, which one will you try out first?