Now that we aren’t watching TV on weekdays, I have been trying to come up with more fun activities that the kids can do in the afternoons. They love to help me cook and they are also pretty good at finding fun games to play together. But in the past few weeks, I came up with a few more “organized” activities  that they both loved, so I thought I would share. Of course, they are all from Pinterest!

Baking Soda and Vinegar Art:

For this project, just dump a bunch of baking soda in a shallow dish and give the kids a cup for of vinegar (tinted with food coloring) and some eye droppers. The kids can drop the vinegar into the baking soda to make beautiful fizzy designs. This was fun for Sam and Campbell and then they decided it would be more fun to pour all the vinegar in and mix it with their hands, which was fine with me. But it did create quite a mess!

Car Wash:

This one is super easy to set up! Just fill a baking dish (or bowl) with soapy water and give the kids toy cars to wash. You’ll also want to give them some scrub brushes and washcloths to make it more exciting and a towel to dry them off once they are clean. I just set them up on a towel to minimize the clean up.

Frozen Animal Rescue:

This one definitely requires more prep work, but it was worth it! I ordered some ocean animals from Amazon because we didn’t have any and I figured the kids could play with them after this project. But you could definitely use any plastic figurines you already have. To do this, you need to freeze the objects in layers in a bowl, so I just put a little water in a big bowl with some animals. Once that froze, I added a few more animals and some more water, etc. I think I did 3 or 4 “layers” of water. Then I just dumped the frozen bowl into a dishpan (from the dollar store) and gave the kids squirt bottles full of lukewarm water tinted with food coloring, some salt, and spoons to chip at the ice. The squirt bottles are from Amazon (you can get them at the dollar store during the summer) but you could also use empty glue bottles. I put a disposable plastic table cloth under the towels to prevent the floor from getting completely water logged. The kids had so much fun and worked on this for over an hour! Sam got a little frustrated that it took so long to get the first animal out, but of course it went faster once the ice started melting and had lots of fun!