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!

20+ ideas for being active with your kids , plus free printable activity cards so you can make an activity jar.

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.

20+ ideas for being active with your kids , plus free printable activity cards so you can make an activity jar.

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.
How to play balloon tennis
  • 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!
  • 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 try ice skating
How to play sock wrestling!
  • 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’.
  • 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 yogaCosmic kids is a great youtube channel for little kids and there’s loads of other yoga videos on youtube to try out
Nerf gun fight - how to play
  • 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’
  • Play tennis – in the street or up against a brick wall.

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.

Active Ideas - print them out and make your own activity jar

Download The Active Idea Cards and Make an Activity Jar.

Click here to download the active idea cards

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.

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    13 Comments

      1. It’s amazing how much more interested my kids are now that I stuck the ideas in a jar! LOL It’s like lucky dip!

    1. OMG sock wrestling is GENIUS! Love it!

      If I lived in Victoria, I’d totally sign up. (I wonder if they do something similar in NSW?) We love Autumn for getting outside – it’s not as hot as summer, which makes it easier for us to go on bushwalks, or go for a walk along the beach and play in the sand. I have a huge piece of butchers paper on the wall where we add all our ideas. But I hadn’t really thought about active indoor activities that we could do at home too. I’ll have to add these to our list! And sock wrestling is going at the top!

    2. What a fab idea to put the ideas in a jar! It’s so easy to be lazy about being active and a habit we fall into here sometimes, especially when we have been busy with life in general. My kids are loving putting the sprinkler under the trampoline on hot days at the moment.

    3. Love the idea of an activity jar, seems that kids always get a kick out of choosing and not knowing whats coming up. My kids always loved treasure hunts ….for odd shaped leaves or stones or other interesting things in the garden.

    4. Being a PE teacher, getting kids active is really important to me. I love these ideas and think the more we can inspire children to get moving, the better health we set them up for later in life. I also think that being a good role model and getting active ourselves is a fantastic way to instill a love of physical activity in our children as they grow. Thanks for the great ideas. I can’t wait to use them with my kiddos!
      Kate

    5. Hi Kate

      I love all your great ideas. I manage a school library and adapt and use a lot of your wonderful activities, thank you.

      Enjoy your children while you can they will be grown up before you know it!

      Darls

    6. A new playground that’s great for active kids is Maritime Cove in Port Melbourne bit.ly/maritimecove lots of climbing opportunities plus scooter/bike track and beach on the doorstep!