If it’s a really rainy day and you don’t feel like braving the weather, why not try some of our favourite indoor rainy day activities, for the whole family to enjoy together.
1) Bake bread together
Fresh home-baked bread has a wonderful, warming and cosy smell – perfect to enjoy together on a rainy day. You could take this one step further and make a bread picture on a large baking tray. Try making a landscape with trees and flowers, mountains, little houses and roads. The possibilities are endless!
Decorate your landscape scene using clean paintbrushes – you could add food colouring, or egg glaze to make it shine. I find it works best to part bake the bread and then paint the colours, finishing with a final bake.
2) Build a playscape together
You could add props such as scarves or ribbons to create rivers and land. Recycled cardboard tissue boxes and kitchen roll inners could become houses, bridges and tunnels. Combine a selection of different toys such as wooden blocks, animals, Playmobil and Lego, and combine them to create adventures and ‘live’ in your world.
3) Enjoy a movie afternoon
Set up a room to create your own home cinema. You could start off by involving your children to make cinema tickets, and paper or card cones for popcorn. Close the curtains and turn off the lights to make your cinema and collect everyone’s tickets. Have an interval half way through the film for ice cream and popcorn – your child could deliver the snacks on a tray, and you could use torches so you can see what you’re doing!
4) Make a family play
Choose a familiar story like Cinderella, or any of your family favourites. You can involve the whole family with different elements, such as writing a script, making props from cardboard boxes and painting the scenery. Raid your wardrobe for costumes, and improvise with for example soft toys to pull your ‘pumpkin’ carriage along – try making the carriage with a blanket rolled up into a ball and tied with string or ribbon. Or you could ‘sit’ on the carriage on chairs, using a skipping rope for reins. Make paper tickets for everyone and record your show, creating lovely memories to reflect on in years to come.
5) Eat fruit kebabs
Chop up all sorts of different fruit into similar sized pieces. Everyone can help with the chopping and then thread the fruit onto wooden skewers. You could make it more fun (and appealing) by making a dipping sauce – try melted chocolate or yoghurt and mint.
6) Spend time looking at old family photos
Children love seeing photos of when they were babies. You could watch family videos of your children growing up, or films and photos from your own childhood and of your parents. If you have old photos you could spend some time collating a slide show to watch together and talk about. Sharing photos and memories of when they your children were small as well as your own childhood and your relatives, can be a lovely way to cement memories and your family history.
7) Have a musical time
You could enjoy a family sing-a-long session, or karaoke if you have the kit. Choose to use instruments to accompany your music if you can play. Or if you can’t play an instrument, take out your pots, pans and wooden spoons and make your own musical instruments.
8) Prepare a family tea
Make tea time a special occasion – dress your table with a tablecloth and flowers, and get out your best china teacups and a cake stand. Perhaps parents can enjoy a glass of fizz! You could prepare by baking cakes and biscuits for the children to decorate. You could also help your child make place names for everyone and design a menu.
9) Relax into a family massage
Set the scene with some relaxing music, and calming aromatherapy scented candles. Gather massage tools such as rollers (if you have them) and body oils. Take it in turns to lie down on comfy cushions or a sofa covered in towels to capture any inevitable oil spillage. You could ‘draw’ a picture on each other’s backs with the oil. Children love using massage rollers or you could even improvise with toy cars! Draw your ‘back picture’ with finger tips or by dipping a small brush into the oil and ‘painting’. One of our favourites is to draw a seascape, accompanied by ‘it was a perfect day for a visit to the sea, here’s the sea, and here’s a boat going fishing…’. Another favourite is to ‘make’ a pizza – ‘here’s the dough, let’s spread the tomato sauce, and add some toppings…’.
10) Create a family artwork
You could use a large canvas or just a big piece of cardboard. Bring together all sorts of different art mediums such as paints, pastels, pens, chalks, charcoal and crayons – whatever you have to hand. You could look around for some loose parts to glue on such as shells, dried flowers, odd toy parts, food packaging and magazine pictures of things you and your children like.
Divide your material into sections so everyone has their own part to create whatever they like in. At the end you could fill any gaps with a single colour paint to blend your masterpiece together – sponge paint will give a good covering of colour as well as creating a lovely texture. Maybe you could all do a painted hand or foot print and sign and date your great work!
We hope you like our rainy day ideas – what do you like to do as a family when it’s raining outside, we’d love to hear from you.
About the Author: Paula Woodman
