This is the number one phrase that drives a mom crazy… “I’m bored, mom!” My teenager use to say it all the time. He doesn’t anymore since I started giving him no so fun things to do so he wouldn’t be bored. HA! Right now, it’s my 5-year old that says it. She’s got a sister and a room full of stuff to play with and she tells me she’s bored. My idea to solve bordem is make them clean but then we all  know they’d be complaining about that. So here is a list of kid friendly things to keep your young ones from driving you crazy with that phrase. 

Arts & Crafts

What my husband and I did was cleared out one of our lower kitchen cupboards and turned it into the craft cupboard. We have everything from coloring books to glitter in that cupboard and our girls love it. Keeps them entertained for hours. If  you’d like to create something like this, here’s what we have in ours: 

• Coloring books & crayons
• Markers
• Glue sticks
• Notebooks
• Popsicle sticks
• Stickers
• Foam shapes
• Googly stick on eyeballs
• Construction paper
• Pencils
• Kid friendly scissors
• Glitter glue
• Color by number books
• Puzzles

Forts

The other day, my husband build a blanket fort in the living room for the kids and they spent like 2 hours in that thing. Literally just laying there. We filled it full of pillows, books and their stuffed animals and they just had a blast. Here’s what you need to make a successful blanket fort:

• Blankets of course
• Furniture such as couch and/or chairs
• Pillows
• Books/coloring books
• Toys

Learning activities

My 5-year old is all into homework and learning right now. She loves learning to read and write words especially. I have partnered with education.com  to provide you guys with some awesome learning activity worksheets. Here is a message from Courtney at Education.com:

Little ones are always on the move, so they will love tracing these transportation words. Moms will love the practice kids get with letter formation and word recognition. For even more fun educational resources, visit education.com.

Here is a list of what education.com offers:

• Maze
• Word search
• Word search with images
• Crossword puzzle
• Word scramble
• Addition
• Subtraction
• Division
• Multiplication
• Spelling Test
• Matching words to images
• Word Tracer

Right now, I am featuring their word tracer worksheet. My 5 year old loves things like this, especially since she’s learning to read and write. This has been a big help to her and it’s such an awesome feeling to see how proud of herself she is for writing words! You can download their worksheet below or go to their website and look at all their worksheets they have for grades pre-k to 5th grade! Click the link below to download this word tracer worksheet!

word tracer_travel

Movie & Snacks

We like to all watch movies in the living room. On the floor with pillows surrounding us, eating snacks. The girls love to do this and so does my teenager really. Good way to keep them all occupied. Another genius way to keep them entertained would be to put them in a box. Don’t know why, but kids love boxes. A good snack would be fruit pieces. My kids love fruit. Below I have listed everything that would be good to use during movie time:

• Pillows
• kid tray full of fruit
• blankets
• Boxes
• Juice boxes

Cat Toys

As funny as this sounds, give them cat toys when they say they’re bored. They’ll either play with it (Like my daughter does) or play with the cat with it if you have one. If not, then the toy should entertain them because you know that things that aren’t theirs seem to entertain them more than the stuff that is theirs. My three-year old will play with our cat for hours with a cat toy. The funny part is, our cats will following her for hours.

Outside

Let them play outside (Not when it’s freezing of course). Get a swing set or a jungle gym for them to play on. My daughter would sleep outside if I let her. She has a playhouse, a jungle gym and a swing. She lives all of them, but would play in the dirt over anything. Even if we had absolutely nothing in our backyard, she would still rather be outside.  She is actually okay with the idea of her sleeping in her playhouse.  She won’t sleep in her room, but she’ll sleep outside. Go figure. 

There are a ton of other things your kids can do, these are just my personal favorites!

Hope you all enjoyed, and please check out Education.com.

XOXO