20+ Fun Ways to get Active With your Kids

This post is sponsored by Premier’s Active April

It was easy to keep active over summer, just jump in the pool and you’ve clocked up your 30 minutes of activity for the day without even trying. But now that the weather is cooling down and the kids are back at school, I’ve found myself in a bit of a slump.

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.

My plan has two phases – step one join Premier’s Active April and step two – make an activity jar. Two simple, fun, ideas to help me get out of my slump.

Step 1: join Premier’s Active April.

The first part of my plan is to sign up for Premier’s Active April to help me stay motivated and encourage us to try some new activities.

Premier’s Active April is a free initiative to promote healthy, active, lifestyles and encourage everyone to do 30 minutes of physical activity a day during April. You can log on and track your activity, plus you’ll get weekly emails with ideas, competitions and information about local events which should make planning family activities even easier

I’ve signed up as a way to keep track of how we are doing with our goal to be more active, it’s free and there are loads of freebies and discounts for participants so I’ve signed up the whole family.

We’ll be hitting our local swimming pool more than once over the school holidays thanks to the free passes on offer at YMCAs and local government centres, and we might even spend a day walking around SEA LIFE Melbourne Aquarium as the two for one ticket offer for Active April participants makes being active with a family way more affordable!

Find out more information and join in with Premier’s Active April here

Step 2: Make an Activity Jar.

To help us meet our goal of staying active I knew I needed lots of simple, fun activity ideas so I asked my kids to come up with a list of activities we could do together. Their ideas had to involve activity, but apart from that, it was up to them. It could be things to do inside or outside, activities for at home or somewhere special to visit, whatever they could think of!

The kids did come up some kinda crazy ideas, we are not going to be climbing Uluru any time soon, but between us, and some ideas from the Premier’s Active April events and local offers list we came up with a heap of activities that I printed out, cut up and put in a jar.

At the start of the week we are going to pull an activity out of the jar for every day we don’t already have something active planned.

I’m going to be flexible, and if we are busy we’ll redraw any activity that needs a big time commitment or lots of preparation, but the plan is to have lots of ideas ready to go so there are no excuses.

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

Here are some of the active ideas on our list…

• Have a treasure hunt – make a list of natural 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. If you join Premier’s Active April there might be a local pool near by offering free passes to participants!
• 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 so we have a few places in mind like Hanging Rock and Lorne beach.
• Find a zumba or aerobics routine on youtube – Older kids will pick up adult a basic adult zumba or aerobics routine easily, but there are lots of kid-friendly options for small kids like this one, or just search ‘zumba kids’ on youtube.
• Go roller skating or even try ice skating

 


• 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 – Use this free printable to make a movement dice.
• Visit a new park – we haven’t been to the Royal Park Nature Playground yet, and Crocodile Park at Point Cook also looks awesome, 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!
• 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, or at Melbourne Park – you’ll get one free hour tennis court hire if you are an Active April participant!
• 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.

There are loads of free and discounted activities happening in Victoria for Premier’s Active April so you might find that planning one of the activities above is much more fun and afforbable than you think. Check out what is on offer here.

I’ve created a set of active ideas cards with 14 of these activities plus a blank page so you can add your own ideas and make your own activity jar.

You can download the set of Active ideas cards here.

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

Please remember that the printables at picklebums.com are for personal use only, you may not sell, share, or link directly to these files.

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.
And I’d love to have you join us and sign up for Premier’s Active April too – you can find out more here.