9 Easy Spring Activities for Kids That Are Free, Fun & Outdoorsy
With spring finally here and bringing some much needed sunshine with it, we have been super excited to get back outside and to the spring activities we love so much.
If you are looking for some inspiration for some easy, free and fun ideas to get your little ones off devices and back outside we have a great list for you.
Fun, easy and free Spring Activity ideas
1. Magic painting
This has always been a huge hit in our house. As a mum, the thing I love the most about it is that there is absolutely no preparation time and creates an activity that keeps them entertained!
All you need are paint brushes, water and a sunny day for magic painting. I find that providing a good selection of brushes is useful, which hopefully you have in your diy cupboard, but these can also just be normal children’s painting brushes.
The idea of magic painting is that children can paint anything they like in the sunshine, and the magic is that the sun makes it disappear by drying it. Children may want to paint pictures on the patio or pretend they are painting the fence.
One thing my children love about this activity is that it feels a bit mischievous, as they aren’t really supposed to paint on the floor or fence with normal paints. It’s great for role play too, as they pretend to be mummy painting the shed whatever pretend colour they like.
Set up a toy wash
This activity is perfect as you can adapt it to work with any toy your child is interested in!
All you need is a big bowl/tub/bucket of soapy water (we just use some Fairy Liquid) some cleaning implements like sponges, brushes or toothbrushes and a towel.
Then simply line up your chosen toys and your children can give them a good clean and leave them to dry in the sun.
Toys that work well for this are:
- Barbies
- Cars
- Animals
- Duplo bricks
For our activity here my daughter loved giving all of her Barbie’s a really good bath. This activity is another great one for imaginative play and the big bonus is that the toys get a good cleaning the process!
3. Make a fairy/dinosaur garden
If you’ve got some flowerbeds or plant pots, why not turn them into small worlds for your children’s favourite toys.?
You could collect some leaves and twigs and make a great place for dinosaurs to hang out. Or you could find some little solar lights and wrap them around a plant to make a magical fairy kingdom
There are endless possibilities to this one as you can create whole new worlds for each kind of toy.
We haven't tried this one out yet, but there are lots of inspiration for how you can make your on Pinterest.
4. Lunchtime treasure hunt
We absolutely love treasure hunts in our house, so I jump at every opportunity to create one.
Creating a lunchtime treasure hunt is one of my favourite activities that I've done for my children. Seeing their happy faces when they came down for lunch and found a note telling them their toys had hidden their lunch in the garden was well worth the effort!
For this activity, I gathered some of my children’s favourite toys, then hid them around the garden with different items of their food. We had monster trucks carrying their plates, cuddly toys hidden in bushes with chocolate bars and dinosaurs with their sandwiches in their open mouths.
This is also a great activity of you have friends or family over or even for parties. With Easter just around the corner too this gets them in the spirit for any upcoming Easter egg hunts they may have.
5. Slide painting
If you already have a children’s slide in the garden why not turn it into a big, fun painting activity?
For our painting activity we used monster trucks, which made great tyre prints, but there are so many other toys you can do this with, like marbles, cars, balls or even a mixture of all of them.
For this activity we used a toy slide, the foot of which sat in a tuff trays. We then sellotaped paper all down the slide and in the base of the tuff tray. I then put some blobs of paint at the top of the slide and lined the midget trucks up just bring them. My children then rolled the trucks through the paint and watched them roll down the slide.
This activity has so many hidden educational benefits too. Along with it being creative, we talked about lots of things that helped their mathematical and scientific knowledge too. Questions like ‘how far did that one go?’ , ‘which truck can go the furthest? And measuring how far each truck went kept the fun and learning going.
6. Ice play
If you follow us you know that ice play is another HUGE hit in my house. When the sun comes out it’s one of the first activities they ask for.
This is another supper easy and free activity, it just needs a bit of planning the night before.
The night before the activity put some of your children’s favourite small toys into bowls or containers, fill them with water and put them in the freezer to freeze the toys over night.
The next day, simply get them out of the freezer and put them in something like a tuff tray (to catch the melted water) then challenge your children to free their toys.
I normally give my children a selection of tools to break their toys free. These tools are things like:
- Pipettes with warm water
- Toy hammers
- Paint brushes
- Jugs of water
7. Outdoor tuff trays
With tuff trays the possibilities really are endless. To see all of our tuff trays click here.
Some of our favourite tuff trays have been based on books. The benefit of having trays outside is that they can be a bit messier. Trays where we have used dry cereal indoors can use mud outside. If you’re feeling really messy, you can put water in them too to create pools or streams for the toys.
One tray that stands out in particular for me as one that was so fun to make was this dinosaur themed one.
The making of this tray was an activity in itself, as we went to the woods to collect sticks, leaves and even flowers for the dinosaurs world
8. Make your own Easter treat
We have some great Easter moulds at home and we always keep a supply of cooking chocolate in the house for making homemade treats.
Here are some of our favourites:
Chocolate cornflake cake filled Easter eggs
9. Flower pictures
This is another great one for creative little ones. All you need for this is some card (paper can work, but even if you just use the thinner card from a cereal boxes would be better), some scissors and some flowers.
With your card you create images with small holes (think of how a heart looks in a dot to dot picture). Think up your image then draw it onto your card. Then pierce the card with your scissors with holes just big enough for flowers to be threaded through (be careful not to make them too big or the flowers won’t stay.).
Then set off on a hunt for flowers. At this time of year there are daisy’s everywhere, and these are perfect for this activity.
Once you have your flowers you can thread them through the holes and create a beautiful flower picture.
So, there you have it! I really hope there are some fun ideas that you and your little ones will love doing together this Spring!
If you do try any out we would love to see how you've got on, so please do share with us on Instagram
