10 Easy Outdoor Activities to Keep Kids Entertained During Quarantine

Pirate Mommy, let's go and explore the world with Treasure Justice! Pfft! ♪ Upbeat music ♪ Hey guys, what's up? It's Raven. I'm back again for another 10 activities video. If you guys have not seen my other one where I did 10 indoor activities that you can do with your kids during quarantine, definitely check that out. But this one is going to be 10 outdoor activities that you can do with your kids during quarantine to cure some of this lockdown boredom that I know we are all experiencing. Yay! These are all gonna be pretty easy and only using things from the dollar store or things that you should already have around the house. And they're gonna be perfect for preschoolers and kindergartners. My daughter is four and she had a lot of fun with all of these. But honestly, I think kids of all ages could enjoy some of these activities. So I've divided them up into three categories. Number one is the easy game. So this is just to kind of get kids going outside. Nothing too crazy, super simple. Then number two is the messy category. So this includes things like mud and paint and getting down and dirty, which I know is not for everyone. I actually took a poll on my Instagram to see who likes messy activities and who doesn't. And it was, you know, 75 to 25. So I think hopefully, you know, most of you guys will enjoy the messy activities. Also, I understand that not everyone even has a backyard or an area appropriate to do some of these things. Just take what you can from this video depending on your situation. But then the last category is the wet category. So these are the activities that involve water and you will probably wanna have your swimsuit on. Activity number one is giant tic-tac-toe. This is super simple. It's just tic-tac-toe, but it's a better way of playing it so that you can play over and over again. Basically, all you need is some sidewalk chalk and some pool noodles. I got these noodles for just a dollar each at Dollar Tree. And you're gonna wanna get two different colors. That way you can differentiate who's who. So basically all I did was cut up the pool noodles into my game pieces just using regular scissors and then go outside, get your chalk, create your tic-tac-toe board. But instead of using chalk to actually play the game, you're using your pool noodle game pieces. That way you can play over and over again on the same board without having to worry about erasing the chalk, washing off the chalk, or creating a whole new board and covering your entire driveway with tic-tac-toe games. This is just a quicker, easier way to be able to play multiple rounds of tic-tac-toe. You win! You got three! Okay, so we got the kids outside to play a game. Let's take it a step further and maybe go for a walk and explore a little bit. So activity number two is a scavenger hunt bingo, or you could call it nature bingo. Basically you are going to create your own bingo card. You can print off a blank bingo card. If you just literally Google search blank bingo card, you can fill it in. You can even have the kids color their own pictures onto the spaces, or you can do it yourself. So get your bingo card ready and take a crayon or a marker with you and go exploring outside. Of course, social distancing, be safe, but you could go for a walk around your neighborhood and try to get bingo by crossing off the things on the card. So I just put simple things that were easy to find, like flowers, grass, sticks, clouds, stuff like that, but I also put litter or like trash on there as well. I would suggest maybe bringing a pair of gloves to be more sanitary, but just if you see any trash laying around, you can cross that off of your list, but you can also pick it up and dispose of it properly and just help out the planet a little bit. Activity number three is a little weird, but it actually turned out to be pretty fun. This is called Ice Block Smash. Basically, your kids are going to be able to pretend to be some sort of archeologist or something like that. All you're going to need is a plastic container of some sort and some water and some treasure or animals or rocks and stones and gems to act as the treasure that they're going to find. Basically, what you're going to do is create a glacier, if you will, full of fossils, if you will, and the kids are going to use a hammer once it's frozen to break it open. So the way that you can make the glacier is you wanna do it in layers. So you would pour one layer of water, put some treasure in there, put it in your freezer, let it harden. Once that's frozen, then you pour another layer of water, put more treasure and just do it in layers like that. Once the whole thing is frozen, literally take it outside, give your kids a hammer. I know this sounds crazy. Do this at your own risk. You know your child better than anyone if they can handle this responsibility or not. Of course, teach them how to be safe with it. My thing was I was telling Ziya to always hold the hammer with two hands. That way there's no accidental finger smashing and yeah, let them hammer away and find the hidden treasure within the glacier. One thing I will say, do not use these little glass rocks that I used because there is a risk of actually breaking them with the hammer. We didn't have a problem with it, but it was just something I thought of afterwards. So I would definitely stick to like plastic toys or rubber toys, anything that won't be broken by the hammer itself. I know the ice itself looks a little scary when you're breaking into it, but it's not sharp. It's not dangerous. It's totally fine. It's just more so the things that you put in the ice. But yeah, it's really fun. Kids don't really get an opportunity to be allowed to destroy things. So I think that's what makes it fun. And it's also just fun to pretend that you are an adventurer or a discoverer of some sort. Pirate mommy, explore the world with treasure justice. Our first messy activity is DIY puffy sidewalk chalk paint. So this is just a fun alternative to regular sidewalk chalk. And you only need a few ingredients that you should have in your pantry, as well as some squeeze bottles, which you can get from the Dollar Tree in the cooking section. These are just ketchup and mustard bottles. So all you're gonna need is one cup of flour, one cup of water. You're gonna wanna mix this up inside of a Ziploc bag and squish it up really good so that you don't have any lumps. And then you're gonna add one cup of shaving cream. You can get the cheapest shaving cream you can find. It really doesn't matter. Then from there, you're gonna color it whatever color you want using food coloring. So you can make as many colors as you want, depending on how many bottles you have. We only had two bottles, so we just ended up making pink and blue. But make whatever colors you want. Mix it up really, really good in the plastic bag. And then an easy way to fill up your bottles is to just cut the tip off of the plastic bag and fill up the bottles that way. From there, put the top on, take it outside onto any concrete surface like your sidewalk or your driveway, and paint away just like you would use normal puffy paint. And I know what you're thinking. Is this going to stain my driveway? No, it is not. I tested it out and it rinses off totally clean with water. I actually recently had an issue with regular old sidewalk chalk staining my concrete, but this did not stain at all, so that's good. And if you happen to live somewhere where you feel like you're not really allowed to do stuff like this on the sidewalk or you're worried about making a mess, I think you could also just take a piece of cardboard or even just paper or something, and instead of putting it directly on the concrete, you can still use this mixture on top of like cardboard or something like that. Our next messy activity is painting rocks. And this is something fun that you can kind of combine into the nature scavenger hunt from earlier. If you come across any cool rocks or stones, pick them up as you go on your scavenger hunt and save them for this activity. Obviously, don't steal decorative rocks off of your neighbor's yard or anything, but you know what I mean. So we had some rocks and we're just using washable kids paint, taking it outside because it can get kind of messy. We just rinsed off our rocks and we painted cool little designs onto the rocks. This is super simple, but it's something that kids can have a lot of fun with and be creative. And even if you find a rock that already is shaped like something, you can paint it into that object if that makes sense and just have fun with the different designs and creations that you can make. The last activity in this fun, messy category is something that I think is so fun, but I know not everybody is going to be into it, but this is the mud kitchen, also known as the mud cafe. Okay, this is a real thing, you guys. If you go on Pinterest right now and type in mud kitchen, you're gonna see people building out these whole backyard kitchens for their kids with sinks and countertops and pots and pans and this whole build out so that they can make mud pies in the backyard, which I think is super cute. I think kids love to do this type of thing and I think it's good to let your kids get dirty every once in a while, as long as it's done in a safe way. I personally was not going to build a whole kitchen in my backyard, but I thought I could do something similar by just using things from the dollar store. So I picked up some plastic bowls, cups, a tray. They even had this little water dispenser, which was really cute. And in the regular cooking section, they had these little mini spoons and spatulas. And I also got just like some little shovels that were in the outdoor play section. The Dollar Tree has a lot of cute little stuff that you could use just for this activity. I also even bought some little rocks and stones and little plastic toys. These are all from the Dollar Tree, just to add in to the whole mud kitchen vibe. You might have tons of stuff in your backyard that the kids can play with. I really don't because I live in a new development, so it's kind of all cleared out and fresh and clean. So I actually had to buy rocks and buy dirt for this. And I just decided to put it into a container and create like a little quick mud kitchen in my backyard. Definitely take necessary precautions on, you know, making this safe and making sure that the kids are not getting into anything that is dangerous to their health or anything like that. You know, you don't want your kids playing in the stuff that has manure in it and stuff like that. You want just like regular topsoil or sand or something like that. And just, you know, do it to your own comfortability level. You can, you know, have them just play with water and rocks or you can have sand or you can have dirt or you can have, you know, whatever suits you. But I think just letting them play with nature and having their own set of bowls and cups and shovels and spoons is really fun. And it can literally keep them entertained for hours. Me personally, I let Ziya get as dirty as she wants. And then I just use the water hose to spray her and everything else down before we go inside. And then we get straight into the bathtub and that's that. Okay, now moving on to the water activity. So the first thing I was gonna do was a DIY slip and slide. This, I have to tell you right off the bat, was kind of an epic fail. It ended up being a DIY ratchet water park type thing. So basically I saw online that people were taking rolls of plastic sheeting and making slip and slides in their backyard. I thought I could do a little mini version by just getting a plastic tablecloth from the dollar store, laying it out, getting some water, maybe some soap to make it more slippery. My backyard has a slope to it anyway. I thought it was gonna be super easy. So I cut up the tablecloth, tried to lay it out, tried to make it work. It just was not working whatsoever. However, I did notice that I had a plastic tarp that you use for painting in my garage. So I laid this out, got some stuff to hold it down so it wouldn't blow away, put some water on it, used some baby soap and this did kind of work. It was slippery, it had a slope to it because my yard is sloped, we had more surface area and we were able to slide down this little paint tarp a little bit better but it wasn't a complete success. I feel like it could work. I don't know what I did wrong but maybe you guys can make it work. One thing that I did figure out how to do is taking another one of these $1 pool noodles from the dollar store and just poking holes in it and then sticking the water hose in one side and clogging up the other side with a little cut off piece of another pool noodle and this made kind of like a little DIY sprinkler or shower system. You guys could probably get creative with pool noodles and your water hose and maybe a slip and slide of some sort and make your own little ratchet water park in your backyard. We had fun with it even though it wasn't a complete success. This next activity is a lot more simple and this is fishing games that you can do in your backyard. I actually already had this little inflatable baby pool. I think I got this from Target. I know you can get like the plastic ones that are a little bit smaller or honestly you don't need a baby pool. You can just use some sort of a large plastic container and fill it up with water because we're not really using this for swimming. We're using it for fishing. So you can use your cut up pool noodles from earlier and have those act as the fish in the pool or you can also make a game out of water balloons. So I got these bunch of balloons which are super cool. They're like an easy way to fill up water balloons. Put these in the water and then using this little bug net that I got from the dollar store, I had Ziya try to fish out all of the balloons. That kind of, the net wasn't really working so then it was like okay, let's just use our hands. Basically the idea behind the game is you're trying to race and get as many balloons into your own container as you can so that you can have the most ammo. Oh, you got more than me! Yeah! And then we're gonna have a water balloon fight. So you're just trying to get the most balloons so you can throw the most balloons at the other person. This is really good if you have multiple kids. The reason why we're doing this with water is because the water balloons will pop if you just put them onto any hard surface so having containers of water helps with that but you can also make some educational games out of this. We have these little alphabet bath toys so you could call out different letters to have her try to fish those out with the net or have her try to gather up certain letters and see what they spell. Different things like that. You could even just put little rubber duckies or little pool toys or bath toys in there and try to fish them out. Honestly, be creative. Come up with your own games. The next activity is giant bubbles. So for this you're gonna want some dish soap and some cornstarch and some water. This is how we're gonna make our own bubble solution and then you're also gonna need some straws and some sort of string to make your bubble wand. So for the bubble wand, you're literally just taking two straws, threading some string through it, tying the string and you wanna hide the knot within the straw so that you get kind of this square shape and then fill up a large container with water and add a whole bunch of dish soap in there and a scoop of cornstarch. Mix this together really well. This is just supposed to make a thicker bubble solution that kind of holds up better for bigger bubbles. You can actually do a super jumbo version of this by actually making a large amount of this solution in a baby pool and using a hula hoop as your bubble wand. But this is just kind of like the medium version. Once you have everything mixed up, take it outside and you just dip your DIY bubble wand into the container and glide it across the sky to create super big bubbles. You can also try blowing into it. This is really fun. Once you get the hang of it, you can really create some awesome giant bubbles and I think next time I'm going to try the giant one with the baby pool and the hula hoop because that looks really fun. And speaking of bubbles, our 10th and final activity is DIY bubble art. So for this, you can just use pre-made bubble solution from the store or you can use your DIY solution from before and you're going to want to get some bowls and some food coloring. So pour your solution into different bowls and add a few drops of food coloring to each one to create different colors of a bubble solution. And you're going to want to use some cardstock or some type of heavy paper to create your art on. So basically all you're going to want to do is blow bubbles directly onto the paper and since it has the food coloring in it, it's going to create this really cute design. This is an outdoor activity because since these are colored bubbles, you don't want to do this inside and have bubbles flying and landing onto your furniture and possibly staining things. I was doing this on top of my white table outside though and it did not stain. It wiped right off. So you shouldn't have a problem with anything like that, but definitely do it outside just to be safe. But when you're done, you should have some really cute bubble art that you can frame and hang in your kid's art gallery on the refrigerator. But yeah, those are 10 outdoor activities that you guys can try during quarantine or even after quarantine, just in general this summer. Get outside. If the weather is nice, if you have an outdoor area, definitely make sure you're going outside, getting that vitamin D, getting active. Again, I know not everyone has a backyard or has the things needed for all of these activities, but hopefully there's at least something in this video that you can try. Let me know in the comments down below which one was your favorite or which one you think you will be trying. Give this video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it and I will see you guys in my next one. Bye.