Kick off Spring with 21 crazy fun ideas for you and your kids
Try these clever, creative, cool, and crafty ways to get the season going
By Mary Sears
Highlights for Children
Spring has sprung. Somewhere birds are chirping. Is it still chilly in your neck of the woods? Try these activities and the temperature won’t matter.
- Spruce up your footwear. Decorate plain white sneaks. Using paint pens, doodle your own designs or paint blue skies, wispy clouds, green trees, and lavender flowers.
- Watch nature in action. Tour your town or an area park looking for budding leaves, early blooms, and robins.
- Fashion a kids-only clubhouse with blankets tossed over a circle of lawn chairs. Serve lunch outside.
- Tie-dye T-shirts in soft pastels or wild primary colors.
- Collect rocks, paint them sky blue, leaf green, sun yellow, and cloud white. Display them indoors on the kitchen table, or outdoors around your mailbox or ringing a favorite tree.
- Tap your inner forester. Collect leaves from local trees, identify them, and make rubbings.
- Hang a bird feeder. Then keep it stocked with goodies for feathered guests.
- Spring clean to music to finish faster. Reduce your clutter by 30 odds and ends.
- Go fake camping. Grill veggie or turkey burgers outdoors, sing songs, and feast on s’mores. Sleep inside in a makeshift tent, or a sleeping bag, on the family room, living room, or basement floor.
- Learn birdcalls online. Instead of words, use your personal chirps to say hi to other family members.
- Play catch with water balloons (outside) . . . and keep a stack of beach towels handy for the inevitable explosions.
- Host a tea party outside on a blanket. Serve Rice Krispies treats in pastel colors (dye the marshmallows with a few drops of food coloring).
- Make a spring bouquet with tissue-paper flowers. Fold tissue paper back and forth in a fan effect; fold in half and secure with a chenille-stick ‘stem.’
- Anticipate the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer. Hose down your swing set, hammock, or porch swing now.
- Fly a kite, row a boat, or take up archery.
- Support your local Little League teams. Attend their games, wear the team colors, and donate oranges and water as refreshments.
- Decorate planters, using pinwheels instead of flowers, for an instant garden—no watering necessary!
- Organize a neighborhood stroller-wagon-bicycle parade on a Saturday morning. All wheels welcome!
- Satisfy a sweet tooth. Make springtime sundaes with vanilla ice cream, pastel sprinkles, and lots of whipped cream.
- Do your community a favor. Pick up trash in the park or join forces with your neighbors on spring clean-up day.
- Celebrate spring as they do in other cultures. The Russians eat pancakes; the Swedes light bonfires; the Japanese picnic when the cherry blossoms bloom. You can, too!
Mary Sears writes about homes, gardens, and families. She and her husband have one daughter