Spring offers an enormous opportunity for outside fun activities to do with your children. No one needs to be bored for a second. Beneath the shining sun and in the flower-scented fresh air, all sorts of fun things are just waiting for you to make them happen.
Out in the Backyard
Begin with the most natural thing in the world in spring: planting a garden. Let the children help choose whether its to be vegetables or flowers. Go on a planned shopping expedition to buy the seeds. Show the little ones how to rake and how to use a hoe. They will only have to wait about two weeks for results.
Plan and supervise a formal spring gala, complete with castoff dress-up clothes from your closet and that of some of the neighbors' closets. Have some of the neighborhood children over for fancy crustless sandwiches and pink punch.
Building a birdhouse for the backyard is a family project that everyone can help with. Directions can be obtained from the internet. Even the little ones can learn about measuring with adult supervision. Teach them about respecting tools. Everyone can help paint it.
An easier, cheaper way of attracting birds is to smear some peanut butter onto a pine cone and roll it in birdseed. Then hang it from a branch with some string. Now everybody gets to watch the birds returning home for the summer.
Camping is always fun, even if its only done in the backyard. You can still have a bonfire with marshmallows and singing. You can tell scary stories around the campfire, and if anybody gets too scared they can run to the comforts of their own beds.
To preserve posterity and plant more than a memory, plant a tree.
In the Neighborhood and Local Area
Follow the quacks and take the kids to the nearest duck and/or geese pond with a loaf of stale bread for them to feed to them.
Make a kite, find a large field without any trees, and fly it. Directions for making all kinds of simple to unbelievable kites are at My Best Kite.
Take a nature walk in the woods. Bring bags to collect the things you find so that you can later use them in art projects. Bring a pair or two of binoculars to the woods and go bird watching. Bring a bird guide and learn the names of the birds in your area.
Build paper airplanes or bring your remote-control airplanes and fly them in large fields.
Have a neighborhood scavenger hunt. Pick up some inexpensive prizes from the Dollar Store and organize a simple scavenger hunt with easy to find, non-returnable items like hair pins, paperclips, plastic utensils, matchbooks (covers only), coffee filters, and baggies. First team back with everything wins prizes.
In the Park
Sponsor a "Digging for Treasure" game. You plant the treasure, bring the shovels and pails, and homemade signs and let the other kids in the park dig for buried loot. Go to a park that isn't too crowded, which is mostly frequented by littler kids, and that has a sandbox. Have your kids bury the money – not too deep. Then take the signs that say "Dig here for treasure" and put them in the pails with the shovels.
Then you and the kids get to sit and watch the other children enjoy your good deed. You can discuss what it felt like to be the ones providing all the fun later at dinner.
At the End of the Day
If you have done or or two things mentioned above, there should be no more whining about nothing to do. There will only be children happy but tired from spending a day gardening, kite flying, partying, selling lemonade, setting up camp, making a birdhouse or some other worthwhile enterprise.
Maryellen Grady - When I was around 12 years old, I sold a short story to a girls' magazine, and I got to see it published with my name on it for all to ...
