KIDSPACE educates the children of our community with a curriculum inspired by the interests and needs of the children. Owners and operators Sharon Lascheck and Kathy Stanley are longtime educators with a shared mission to teach and care for children. Whether in the classroom or in our 2,500-square-foot gymnasium, students at KIDSPACE Child Enrichment Center receive only the highest quality instruction from our amazing staff.

Our gymnasium is a vital component of our mission, which is to provide a welcoming and encouraging learning environment that promotes, among other things:

• the development of academic skills
• the development of social skills
• the development of active physical skills
• independence in our students
• a positive self-image

The gym also provides a space for our students to learn that vigorous physical activity and academic excellence go hand in hand.

With that in mind, we thought we’d share with our readers some indoor activities for kids that stimulate their physical skills, academic skills — and sometimes both!

Through All Kinds Of Weather 

In the Pacific Northwest, we are blessed with an abundance of enormous green trees, snowcapped mountains and powerful rivers. Part of the reason why our landscape is arrayed with such wonders is that it rains here — a lot!

Sometimes weather prevents our children from going outside for long stretches of time. Learning how to entertain and inspire the kids without leaving the indoors is a skill that can be difficult to master. So it’s a good thing you’re here at the KIDSPACE blog. That way you can learn from the best and most experienced educators as to how to pull off this challenging feat.

So, without further ado, here are some fun indoor activities that you can do with your kids — on a cold and rainy winter’s day or a bright and shiny summer’s eve. (Or any time at all, really!)

Indoor Activities For Kids

A quick reminder: All of these indoor activities can be done at home! In fact, many of these ideas come from parents of school-aged children. As we know, the best ideas for indoor activities for kids often come from moms, dads, aunts, uncles, and grandmas and grandpas!

Arts, Crafts, Weather!

Arts and crafts help young students develop their imaginations, along with their artistic and building/construction skills. With this fun and engaging activity, you can also incorporate a study of the weather and climate into the mix.

Have the children paint or construct a diorama of the weather as it is on the day of the activity. If it’s raining and dreary outside — maybe it’s December in Vancouver, Washington! — teach the children about why the west side of the Cascades gets so much rain while the eastern side gets so little.

With this fascinating bit of climate and geographical knowledge, the students can then create paintings or three-dimensional tableaus of the rain-shadow effect itself!

Perhaps show them a slideshow on different rain shadow effects across our beautiful planet. You can include Oregon’s Mount Hood and the Alvord Desert, plus the whole of Eastern Washington as compared to our wet western valleys.

Treasure Hunt!

Another swell indoor activity for kids — a treasure hunt! There’s no limit to the number of educational topics around which one can build a fun and informative hunt.

Provide the children with envelopes that contain clues as to the whereabouts of various treasures hidden in the house. All of the clues will have something to do with a particular topic — for example, politics (the 50 states) or history (the original 13 colonies).

If you have enough kids, divide them up into teams and reward the master treasure hunting team with a prize.

This activity keeps kids on their toes, teaches them to work as a team, and helps them think through solutions before deciding on a course of action.

Silent Ball!

This is quite simply a classic indoor activity for kids — a way to keep them engaged and moving while being respectful of indoor spaces and the quiet that’s sometimes necessary within them.

The rules: Use a soft rubber ball or a beanbag. Gather in a circle or in any arrangement which allows for effective gameplay. Toss the ball to anyone in the circle. The person who caught the ball must then throw it to someone other than the person who threw it to them.

A missed catch or a bad pass (as determined by the referee) means that person is out. Talking or making noise also leads to an out. Furthermore, anyone who is out must also remain silent or be disqualified from the next game.

Play continues until only two people remain. The final two are the winners!

Telephone Story Time!

The well-known telephone game gets an educational update with this fun indoor activity.

Begin a story with a sentence; for example, “Sally went to the supermarket with her dad.” The next child adds to the story in whatever creative way they choose; for example, “They were buying a birthday cake for Sally’s mom.” The next child adds to the story — and so on and so forth.

Usually, as the story progresses it gets funny and inventive. Try to keep the kids on track, though, so that — no matter how wacky! — the story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Exercise!

There’s plenty of ways for kids to be active indoors. At KIDSPACE, for example, we encourage our students to be active by tumbling, dancing, or engaging in unstructured “free play.” We do this each and every school day in our gymnasium as well as out of doors.

But there are structured games and age-appropriate exercise routines that can be done indoors, too. Consider playing games such as Twister or lead them through a round of “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.”

We like to encourage movement with music, too. As we say on our “Fitness For Kids!” page, “Classical or Motown music can help get you and your child dancing, demonstrating your playful side while exposing them to music and movement that is fun and nurturing.”