20+ Fun Ways to get Active With your Kids – Free Printable Idea Cards

Try one of these easy and fun ideas to get active with your kids, and use the free printable active idea cards to make an activity jar.

The kids will love picking an idea from the activity jar and getting the whole family together to do something fun!

We all know how important it is for kids to get 30-60 minutes of activity (and more) every day, but sometimes it can be hard to motivate myself, let alone my kids!

I want our family to be active, but it’s more than just the activity itself. I want to spend time together, I want to have fun, I want everyone to come in at the end of the day with that happily exhausted feeling, but it doesn’t always happen easily in our family.

Even if I can come with an idea for something fun and active on the spot, I need to find the motivation to actually do it… but I have a cunning plan to change that.

Make an Activity Jar

To help us meet our goal of staying active we need lots of simple, fun, activity ideas that work for the whole family. And we need to have a simple way to remember all these great ideas, and an activity jar is the perfect solution!

Making an activity jar is easy to do, it’s a great way to remember all your active ideas, and it’s a fun way to choose what activity to try next!

To make and activity jar you’ll need:

• A large jar (or container)
• paper and pens
• or our free printable activity cards (download below)
• scissors

Simply cut up some slips of paper or print and cut up our free printable active idea cards which already have 20 ideas and space for writing your own.

Pop all your activity cards into the jar and at the start of the week pull an activity out of the jar for every day you don’t already have something active planned and add that activity to your calendar!

Be flexible, if you are busy that week redraw any activity that needs a big time commitment or lots of preparation, and feel free to redraw on the day if you just can’t manage the planned activity.

Or you might just like to draw an activity from the jar on any days you have some time and want to do something fun and active.

Once you’ve done an activity you can either set it aside, or if you really loved it you can choose to put it back in and do it again.

The best thing about the activity jar is that you will have lots of ideas ready to go so there are no excuses not to get active!

20 Easy Ideas for Getting Active With Your Kids

So you want to make an activity jar, but what active ideas should you put in it?

Don’t worry we’ve got a great list of fun and easy activities that the whole family will love!

Use this list of active ideas as inspiration, pick out the ones you know your family will love, and then ask your own kids to come up with some active ideas you can do together.

Ideas need to involve something active, but apart from that, it could be anything! You could choose something to do inside or outside, activities for at home or somewhere special to visit, whatever you and your kids can think of!

Here are some easy active ideas you can try:

• Have a treasure hunt – thy this mega scavenger hunt with over 60 items to find and race to be the first to find everything on the list.

• Have a dance competition – break out the wii dance or try one of these youtube channels

• Play tail tag or scarecrow tiggy – found instructions for tail tag here, and instructions for scarecrow tiggy here.

• Play Balloon Tennis – we use kitchen spatulas as rackets!

• Go swimming – take a ball to throw around, or take some pool noodles and have noodle horse races.

• Go bike or scooter riding

• Have a backyard soccer comp – set up goals, divide into teams, and play hard!

• Play chair soccer – if you can’t get outside clear a space, find a soft ball (or even scrunched up paper taped into a ball shape) and allocate everyone a chair. The aim of the game is to kick the ball between the legs of another person’s chair to score a goal while not letting anyone score a goal on your chair!

• Go for a bush walk – even my non-hikers will go for a walk if there is some exploring involved and even better with there is water to play in!

• Sock wrestle! – this game is a simple roughhousing activity that will get everyone’s blood pumping – just set some safety ground rules before you start. Clear a space and make sure everyone is wearing two socks, no shoes. The aim of the game is to get the other people’s socks off without losing your own!

• Play Captains Orders – you can find instructions for playing here, but it’s super fun to make up your own personal family version with commands like ‘dance like Dad’ and ‘chase the chickens’.

• Play super active Simon Says – Download a free printable list of ideas to really ramp up your Simon says here.

• Play an action dice game – try this free printable space themed gross motor dice game.

• Visit a new park – try a new park, or somewhere with fun equipment, but even a park without fancy equipment will be fun if you take a ball or a cricket set.

• Try some yoga – Cosmic kids is a great youtube channel for little kids and there’s loads of other yoga videos on youtube to try out

• Have a nerf gun fight – We set the rule that you can only stay in one hiding spot long enough to reload or catch your breath then you have to move!

• Have a water fight – if the weather stays warm a simple water fight is on the cards, or a game of ‘drip drip drop’ – it works the same as duck duck goose, but you walk around with a cup of water and drip drip drip a little water on everyone’s heads until you choose to ‘drop’ and tip the whole cup on someone and then RUN! Or try one of these water games for kids.

• Make an obstacle course – outside or inside… get creative and add cards with crazy instructions like ‘run backwards around the tree twice before moving on’

• Jump on the trampoline – or try some trampoline games.

• Play tennis – in the street or up against a brick wall.

• Go kite flying – if you are like me you’ll spend a lot of time running around trying to get the kite off the ground! These instructions might help, and here’s a simple kit you can make.

Free Printable Active Ideas Cards

This set of active ideas cards includes 14 of these activities described above plus a blank page of cards so you can add your own ideas to fill your own activity jar.

This printable is an A4 sized pdf file, you will need a pdf reader such as adobe acrobat to open it. It will fit to print on US ‘letter sized’ paper, just be sure to select ‘fit’ or ‘shrink to fit’ from your printer options to allow for printer margins.

Are you good at staying active with your family?

I’d love to have a few more ideas for our activity jar so leave a comment below and tell me how you manage to stay active with your kids and what your kids would add to their activity list.