Perhaps you’re reading this when school is out for the summer, or maybe it’s just the weekend and you’re already hearing those dreaded words from the mouths of your kids. There are few phrases that can drive a caregiver as crazy as the phrase “I’m bored.” What can you do when those frustrating words are uttered? Well, you’re in luck. Below we’re offering several ideas to keep boredom at bay when school’s out.
Boredom Busters For Kids
In no particular order, here are just a dozen ideas you can suggest to your kids when they announce, “I’m bored”:
- Grab a stack of magazines, stick glue, scissors, and a piece of posterboard. Create a poster of all the things they want, their dreams, or of places they want to travel to.
- Write your own play, and then act it out.
- Do a scavenger hunt. Simply find one on Pinterest or Google and hunt away!
- Make a book complete with words and illustrations.
- Hide a treasure, then draw a treasure map, and see if a friend can find it based on your map.
- Build an indoor fort with sheets, couch cushions, furniture and more. Then, grab an iPad or tablet and watch a movie inside.
- Play dressup and then do a photoshoot with a cell phone or tablet.
- Make jewelry from pasta, or create homemade beads from homemade playdough or make some out of paper.
- Find a dance tutorial on YouTube. Learn the dance. Then record yourself doing it.
- Get in the kitchen and help make dinner with your parents.
- Take used bottles and cans and build a robot, make a windchime, or see what other inventive crafts you can create.
- Have an outdoor bubble bath. Fill a kids pool with bubble bath soap and water. Grab your swimsuit and jump in!
Now It’s Your Turn – Brainstorm Boredom Busters of Your Own
While this is far from an exhaustive list, we hope it inspired you to create a list of boredom busters of your own. Head over to Pinterest and check out these posts for even more ideas.
One tip we found that we love is to take all the activities you come up with and write them on individual pieces of paper, and place them into a boredom busters jar. This way, if your children say they are bored, they can simply pick an activity out of the jar and do whatever is on the piece of paper they pull out.