Summer is the perfect time for kids to play and explore the outdoors. The pediatric therapists at NAPA Center have curated a list of 15 fun kids summer activities that your little ones will love. These activities are engaging and educational, from building a homemade obstacle course to playing in the water. Don’t let your kids spend their summer cooped up at home, try some exciting summer activities that will keep them active and happy!
15 Fun Kids Summer Activities To Try This Season
With summer around the corner and kids almost out of school, it’s time to share some of our therapist’s favorite fun summer activities for kids! These activities will help build your child’s skills during the summer while creating memories that will last a lifetime.
We’ve compiled 15 activities to entertain your child while benefiting them in countless ways. Time for some fun!
1. Playing In The Water
Your kids can run through crazy sprinklers, scoop and splash with a water table, make an awesome water wall, play with water balloons, squirt water pistols, or jump and play on a giant outdoor waterbed! Swimming pools make a great addition too! Swimming is an amazing activity that promotes sensory integration, motor planning, spatial awareness, bilateral coordination, improved core and overall strength, and more.
2. Playing At The Park
Outdoor parks are the perfect place to build gross motor skills, fine motor skills, visual skills, sensory processing skills, and even social skills. Kids who crave proprioceptive input and need lots of “heavy work” can work their bilateral coordination, hand strength, and core muscles as they climb ladders and cargo nets and play on the monkey bars. Or they can get lots of good vestibular input as they slide, swing, and spin. Certain parks contain splash gardens that provide a much-needed escape from the heat too!
3. Homemade Obstacle Course
Whether indoor or outdoor, setting up a small obstacle course with objects around the house is a great way to build several gross motor skills into one activity. Pillows make great stepping stones, tunnels can be found rather inexpensively on Amazon, and old pieces of wood make excellent balance beams. You can make the course as basic or as complex as your child can handle, and you can always change it to add variety and more significant challenges.
4. Try New Fine Motor Skill Games
You didn’t think an OT would leave out fine motor play from a list of awesome summer activities, did you? Where to begin?! Some fun fine motor activities and games for school-age kids might include painting with a squirt bottle, squirting down a tower of cups, building marshmallow sculptures, or playing with LEGOs. Or they could create pictures with a Lite Brite, or play Connect 4, Uno, Kerplunk, Jenga, Operation, Angry Birds building and launching game, or Mancala.
5. Get Creative In The Kitchen With Summer Recipes
Being involved in the food preparation process is not only fun for kids. It can be therapeutic for those who are picky eaters. You can try out recipes for different smoothies, homemade popsicles, fruit salads or veggie salads, sandwiches, and even homemade ice cream in a bag! Is your child not open to trying new summer fruits or veggies? Encourage them to at least interact with the food by creating faces, letters, numbers, or other scenes on their plate/table.
6. Gardening
Pull weeds or pick dandelions.
Targets arm strength and anticipatory postural responses to maintain their balance!
Collect sticks or wood chips from all over.
Repetitively squatting to pick something up strengthens legs and improves balance.
Water play.
Fill a bucket, have your kiddo carry it around to help water the plants, and secretly work on strengthening!
Play in the dirt.
Holding deep squats in the dirt is excellent for ankle stability, and getting messy is great sensory play!
7. Get Outdoorsy
- Navigating up and down hills or across uneven surfaces like grass or gravel builds strength and endurance.
- Sidestepping or forward stepping over rocks encourages balance and ankle strengthening.
- Lying in the grass, encourage your kiddo to army crawl/slither like a snake and sneak up on an unsuspecting family member. Army crawl engages the entire body and strengthens the core and arm muscles.
- Playing barefoot in a sandbox strengthens ankles and legs – especially while squatting, jumping, and digging holes with feet.
8. Simon Says
Looking for a fun and engaging activity to boost your child’s body awareness and movement planning skills? Look no further than Simon Says! This classic game offers an enjoyable way to help your child better understand their body and improve coordination. Begin by prompting your child to point to different body parts and mimic the poses you demonstrate. Once they master imitation, take it up a notch by giving verbal commands alone, challenging them to execute actions based solely on your directions.
9. Dancing
Dancing is a way to work on gross motor skills while simultaneously expressing freedom and creativity and teaching a sense of rhythm. Choose songs you know your child will enjoy, including specific movements, like “I’m a Little Teapot” and “Hokey Pokey.” Dancing will help develop balance, coordination, sensory processing, motor learning and planning, and body awareness.
10. Walk Like an Animal or Wheelbarrow Walking
Walk like a bear on all fours to the bathtub. Crab walk to your bed. Wheelbarrow walk to the car. Animal walks are a great way to develop upper body strength, body awareness, and overall coordination.
11. Playing Gross Motor Games
Some fun games to get the large muscle groups of the body working include building an obstacle course (indoors or outdoors), playing with bean bags, crawling through tunnels, and playing games like Twister, Balloon Tennis, Toilet Paper Knock Down, Glow in the Dark Bowling, “Ice Skating” in the Living Room, and other pretend games!
11. Playing With Chalk
When it comes to playing with chalk as a fun summer activity, the possibilities are endless! In addition to letting your child’s imagination flourish by simply drawing with chalk, here are a couple of other fun chalk ideas:
Draw A Balance Beam With Chalk
Walk along the balance beam frontwards, backward, or sideways! Another fun idea is to place red solo cups on both sides and encourage your child to toe-tap them as they walk along the balance beam.
Hopscotch
Take this classic game up a notch by encouraging your child to jump over a square (say, “The LAVA square will burn your feet! Better jump over it to the safe square!”)
Make A Racetrack
Draw a track for their ride-on toy, trike, bike, or scooter – tracing the chalk line wherever it goes targets motor planning and bilateral coordination for steering.
Chalk Twister
Works on color recognition, knowing left and right, and motor planning required to arrange their body to reach each color. Reaching and stretching, then bearing weight in unique positions and balancing to maintain these positions work the vestibular sense and target strengthening!
Chalk Obstacle Course
Putting all these chalk ideas together – walking the chalk line, jumping through hopscotch squares, stomping on chalk circles, drawing hand and footprints to walk on, or any similar ideas you can think of will encourage gross motor movement with a variety of activities all in one.
13. Animal Yoga Poses
Yoga is a fun way to get your child to participate in full-body movement, at any age and ability! Yoga has many health and wellness benefits, such as improving flexibility, strength, balance, body awareness, respiratory and GI function, reducing stress, and improving self-confidence. Check out these fun animal yoga poses for kids to start with!
14. Let’s Play Ball!
When it comes to summer fun, ball activities are always a hit!
Where to begin? There are too many fun ideas to list, but here are a few of our favorites:
Throwing
Pick a target, any target, just not a window! Pick which arm will be their throwing arm, then have your child STEP forward with the opposite foot, POINT at the target with the opposite hand and arm, LOOK at the target so their ball knows where to go and THROW at the target. Step, point, look, and throw – we say it as we play it so the motor plan will stick! Hand-over-hand guidance can help encourage beginner throwers!
Shooting
We don’t need a hoop to play basketball! Gardening buckets, the kiddie pool, a chair with arms, anything can be a basket for basketball. Or you can duct tape a pool noodle to make a circle, and there’s your basketball hoop!
Kicking
Soccer play targets single-leg balance to kick with one foot and motor planning to coordinate where we want the ball to go. Any spot in the yard can be a soccer goal!
Hitting
Modify baseball with a pool noodle as a bat and your choice of a ball:
- Regular balloons – these “baseballs” move slowly, making it easier to coordinate movements in time to hit.
- Beach balls – are usually faster than balloons, but still, allow increased time for motor planning as kids learn this skill.
- Water balloons – are typically much smaller targets and, therefore, harder to hit, but they may come with a fun splash if they get hit just right!
Catching
Catch is a time-tested tradition and a great way to improve gross motor skills . Start with larger balls and gradually make them smaller as your child’s skill level increases. Use balloons, deflated beach balls, or soft, spongy balls for children still mastering catching – they move slower and are more forgiving if a catch is missed. If your child picks up the catching and throwing movements quickly, consider increasing the challenge by having them stand on a squishy surface (pillow, couch cushion) or one leg while playing.
15. Sensory Bins
If you’re looking for a way to keep your child entertained indoors, look no further! A sensory bin is any container filled with materials specifically chosen to stimulate the senses, allowing the child to explore and interact with the items as they choose. Sensory play is a great way to expose your child to various textures, facilitate communication, and actively engage with your child. The best thing about sensory bins is that they are just so much FUN!
That’s a Wrap on Our Favorite Kids Summer Activities!
We hope these ideas leave you feeling inspired and excited for a fun-filled summer with your kids! Children learn so much during unstructured free play – problem-solving, emotional regulation, imitation, social skills, language, fine motor skills, and the list is endless. So giving them new experiences with these activities will help them develop and hone many new skills while having a blast!
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