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Some Budget Holiday Activity Ideas for Kids

Holiday time can be such fun with our kids or it can be a stressful time to keep them amused.
Below is a list of games and activities parents can do with their children. They are easy, cheap and so much fun I can almost hear the laughter now.
• Sand castle building or sand model competition
• Beach Frisbee
• Beach cricket
• Small portable soccer net to play soccer at a park or backyard (you can use cones also)
• French cricket, rounders or continuous cricket where you hit a ball with a bat or racquet and run around a cone before the bowler throws the ball at the stumps. Played with 3 + children
• Tee ball hitting using a large cone for the tee, foam bat and foam ball ($15 Kmart)
• Shuttle cock or badminton
• Build a cubby inside / outside, using chairs and sheets
• Make sculptures out of newspaper and sticky tape
• Make a costumes out of newspaper and sticky tape
• Make a cubby, robot, boat out of cardboard boxes and cylinders (toilet rolls or glad wrap rolls) then paint and decorate them
• Put up a small tent in the backyard or better still let the children put it up.
• Make a handball court with chalk on the driveway or path for hand ball
• Draw hopscotch on driveway or path using chalk
• Play board games
• Teach your children card games
• Make coloured play dough with the children
• Make biscuits or cupcakes with the children and decorate them
• Learn to skip using a skipping rope
• Learn to hoola hoop
• Make a small veggie garden with the children and let them care for it.
• Make up a talent show for the parents
• Celebrity Heads using characters the children know.
• Make paper planes to fly & decorate using old or scrap paper
• Potato prints – cut a potato in ½ then cut a design on it & use an ink pad for stamping the shapes
• Teach children how to sew or knit / French knitting
• Help wash the car or the dog
• Construction using wooden blocks or wood hammer and nails ( with supervision)
• Newspaper hockey inside – use the rolled up newspaper with elastic or glad wrap around it, a soft foam ball them play hockey in the hall way or outside. You can use the door anything to mark the goal. (great on wet days to burn energy)
• Fly a kite in the park, make your own paper bag or plastic bag kites to fly
• Children take photos of their holiday and make a Holiday Book with captions (Officeworks or others do photo books which you can use a variety of designs)
• A variety of magnets and paperclips are great fun. Add a stick, string and a small magnet and the children can make fish and add paperclips to go fishing using the magnet fishing rod
• Balloon volley ball inside, any balloon activity is lots of fun.