Rainy Day Activities for Kids That Don't Involve a Screen (Mostly)

Every parent has a mental list of rainy-day activities, and every parent has watched that list get shorter and shorter as the actual rainy day goes on. Here's ours, roughly in the order we'd reach for them.

Before you reach for a screen

A pillow fort is still undefeated for kids who have the energy to build one, and it buys you a solid hour if you let them raid the linen closet. An indoor scavenger hunt — find something soft, something round, something that starts with the letter B — works for almost any age and takes zero setup. Baking something simple together (even if "together" mostly means them adding sprinkles) tends to eat up more time than you'd expect, between the mixing, the waiting, and the eating.

If you have painter's tape lying around, a taped-out road on the floor for toy cars, or a hopscotch grid, will occupy a kid for longer than seems reasonable for how little effort it takes to set up.

When you've genuinely run out of ideas

At some point, most rainy days end with a screen, and there's no use pretending otherwise. When that happens at our house, coloring is usually where we land before anything else, mostly because it's closer to the pillow-fort end of the spectrum than the video-feed end — it's a kid making something, not a kid being fed content.

Our animal pages (Yarn Kitten, Koala Hug, Sleepy Fox) and vehicle pages (Fire Truck at the Station, Round School Bus, Busy City Street) tend to match up with whatever a kid was just playing with before the rain started, which makes for an easy transition. Everything's free, works right in the browser with no sign-up, and can be printed afterward if the rain lets up and you want to send them outside with a page and some tape for the window.

The honest bit

We're not going to tell you a coloring app is equivalent to a pillow fort — it isn't, and kids usually know the difference. But if the choice on the table is between a coloring app and something with an autoplay button, it's a reasonable place to land until the rain stops.