30 Cheap and Easy Indoor Activity Ideas To Keep Your Kids Busy

Paint with Clothespins & Pom-Poms: This activity is fun and easy to create. Grab some clothespins, pom-poms, paint, and a piece of paper. Hazel liked making dots on her paper, and she also liked mixing the paints together to create different colors. For this craft, you can also use the cotton ball if you don’t have pom-poms. (We got our paint from Hobby Lobby and it’s the CrazArt version, but here is a similar paint on Amazon).

Paint with a Toilet Paper Roll: Don’t’ have a paintbrush? Cut a toilet paper roll. Super easy, and always fun to make pictures with a new kind of paintbrush.

Letter Hunt: Hazel got a kick out of this the first time I did it, and I keep coming back to it when she is bored. It’s a perfect mix of learning and play. All you need is paper and crayons. Cut out square pieces of paper. Write different letters on each piece of paper. I usually choose about 3-4 letters to hide at a time. For example, I’ll have three papers with the letter “H”, four papers with the letter “B”, and three papers with the letter “D”.  First hide the papers, when you’re ready for your child to find the letters, let them know which letter they should be looking for.

Alphabet Matching: Check out this post to find the Alphabet Matching game that we created. It’s easy and gets your kids learning.

Scavenger Hunt: Have your kids look for certain things around the house. You could have them be specific colors or shapes, or even something that starts with a certain letter.

Hide and Seek With Household Items: Take a few things from around your house; a water bottle, a phone, a stuffed animal, etc.  Hide the items in one room of your house and have your child find them. As they are looking, give them clues to where the items are. For example, “this item is next to a plant.” or “this item is underneath something.” This is also fun, but they are learning to recognize direction at the same time.

Shape Matching: Work on matching shapes to their correct spot. Have your child tell you the shape and color of the shape. You can find this printable here.

Paint With Sponges: You can really paint with so many things in your house, you don’t really need a paintbrush.

Color Sort: For this, you can use pom poms, colored bears, play food, blocks, a mixture of things, anything really. Just have your child sort the colors into the correct pile.

Do a Dot Markers: Turn this into a learning experiment or just make it fun. Find these do a dot markers and have your toddler make you pictures, or you can even print pictures off and have them purposefully put the dot in certain spots.

Play with Playdoh: Hazel loves playing with playdoh. The possibilities are endless with playdoh. You can make letters, use play scissors to cut the playdoh, roll out the playdoh and use cookie cutters to make fun designs.

Play Foam: No mess, easy to clean up and it doesn’t dry up. We love playing with play foam, there are so many things you can do with it. Make letters, make animals, make shapes. They can create for hours!

Paint Noodles: Have extra noodles lying around? Give them to your kids to paint! It’s easy, inexpensive and is great for their fine motor skills.

Teach Them: Hazel loves learning, here are a few of the things that we have been learning about: Learning Shapes, Matching Letters, Learning Colors, The Letter B.

Whipped Cream, Food Coloring, a Paint Brush, and Sprinkles: Put whipped cream in a pan or dish with sides. Add dots of food coloring, and then some sprinkles. Have your toddler create a picture with all the different colors.

Fruit Loop Rainbow: Smash up the fruit loops. Take a piece of paper and spread some liquid glue out in the shape of a rainbow. pour the crushed up fruit loops onto the glue.

Paint With Q-Tips: Helps develop fine motor skills and teaches them how to hold a pencil.

Color With Smelly Markers: This is also a fun idea for when you teach your child about the senses (hearing, smelling, seeing, touching). Remember to tell your child that we don’t sit and smell the marker, we just smell it when we are writing or drawing.

Water Beads: Hazel loves watching water beads grow. Once they are done growing we like pretending that the water beads are the pool or the ocean and we take Hazel’s toys and have them swim through the beads.

Tissue Paper and Water: Tear up pieces of tissue paper, get some water, and a paintbrush. Have your child water paint the tissue paper onto a plate, rock, or anything you can think of.

Shape Jump: Cut out shapes -or draw them on the sidewalk if you go outside- and have your child jump to the shape that you call out.

Paint Rocks: Find big rocks from outside and paint them. Once the rocks are dry take them back outside and put them somewhere other people will find them. You could even paint nice messages on the rocks to brighten someone’s day.

Paint Aluminum Foil: Sometimes it fun to switch it up for them, I kid you not, Hazel painted four times as long when she used aluminum foil.

Book Play: Take one of your favorite books and make an activity from it. Here are some ideas that we have done.

Paint Pinecones: One of our favorite things to do it gather pinecones from the grass area behind our house and paint them.

Bake With Them: Hazel loves baking, it’s one of her favorite things to do. But sometimes it’s a lot of work, so on days when I’m in a hurry we just buy the premade dough and throw it on a pan, then I let her decorate the cookies and she has a blast. Still baking, still having fun, less messy.

Make a Fort: Let them build a fort out of pillows and blankets, then give them a book to read while they are in their fort.

Make Popsicles: One of the most fun things to do during the summer, it’s easy, creative, and makes for a healthy snack. Here is our favorite popsicle recipe.

Paint Wet Glue: Put globs of glue on an old lid (like a sour cream container lid, or a butter container lid). Drop food coloring on the glue globs and let them start painting with toothpicks.

Balloon Tennis: Make tennis rackets out of paper plates and popsicle sticks. Then blow up a balloon. Hit the balloon back and forth and see how long you can keep the ballon in the air.

All of these activities should be supervised by adults.

Did you enjoy this post? Pin it so you can refer to it later!