I am not great at camping. No. I’m actually really bad at it! And my kids want to do it so badly. We have camped, as a family, once, in the last eighteen years! I told you! Normally, we take a little bit of a summer trip somewhere, but we are not excited to go anywhere this year, with all of the restrictions in place. Thus, we decided to plan a Staycation, complete with camping in the backyard this week. Of course, since we’re also at home, we will be getting some work done at our campsite, but I still want the week to be fun and filled with memories, and to feel as great as a summer trip to our kids! So, I definitely needed to come up with some camping activities for kids and parents to do together, in order to make it feel more like actual camping!
First things first, there is a reason that I am so bad at camping. When I was a young child, my mom and I lived in a camper for…too long. It was a teeny, TINY camper! Maybe the smallest camper I’ve ever seen! Well, let’s put it this way, the reason that only my mom and I lived in it was because it was too small to fit the other three people in our family!
Now, before you start to think that I must have had a tough childhood…put the brakes on. We lived in a camper, temporarily, as my dad built our house. It was not an easy time, and we weren’t at a campsite with running water. We had a well in our yard that we pumped water from the old-fashioned way and my mom heated up water on that one little burner for washing dishes, clothes, and little children. It was not a novelty, which is why after we got out of that camper and into our home, we never went camping again! Consequently, I am just not a camper.
Our family has friends who lived in a camper at a campground for months! They had lived in a rental home, which was up for sale and was sold while they lived there. In the meantime, they thought they were going to hear “any day” about a job in another state and would be moving, so they packed the kids in the camper and made it a “trip!” They ended up living in various campgrounds for nearly four months before they finally heard about that job!
We visited them and had their kids over to our house many times so they would have something different to do, but I just can’t imagine how my friend kept her kids busy all day! They had a small camper (MUCH BIGGER than the one I lived in though), and not a lot of belongings that weren’t in storage. They didn’t want their children to know they were living in a camper, though, so they made a “camping trip” out of it and traveled to several states over the course of those four months.
She homeschooled her kids in the camper, and cooked elaborate meals on her little stove in a hot camper! Her kids weren’t eating hot dogs over a fire every day. We met them at their site for a picnic one day. I packed sandwiches, apples, and a few snacks for my children. She came out with a steaming pot of Asian stew for hers (and with plenty to share)! My friend was cut out for this!
So, I have people to learn from! And I’m not pretending that camping in the backyard is legit. But it’s something our children have wanted to do as a family for a while, so…legit or not, it’s still fun! Remember, it doesn’t have to be Pin-perfect to be fun!
There are many ideas online for fun camping activities for kids. I’m sure you’ve probably wondered why you would come here for my “Five things” each time, when you can get 120 camping activities from someone else. Well, here’s why. Because five things is doable for me. I can remember five things and I can plan for five things. A list of 120 things overwhelms me and by the time I finish reading the list, I’ve forgotten the ideas I liked! Maybe, your brain can hold all of those ideas so when you go to the store, you know exactly what you need to get…not me.
So, I like to break it down into five things that are actionable and memorable so you don’t have to spend your time planning activities and buying supplies. And yet, when boredom at the campsite crops up, you’ll remember these few ideas and be able to suggest them to your kids, without any prep work at all! That’s the kind of camping I can handle.
Five Family-Fun Camping Activities for Kids
- Nature Art—
Go for a walk with your children, looking for interesting items from nature and collecting them in some sort of container. Make it fun by really examining the items they find! Ask your child what makes the item interesting. What do you like about it? What do you find interesting about it? And take the time to let your child tell you!
Once you’re back at your campsite, lay out a few art supplies. No need to pack the whole craft corner, but a few simple things like paper, pencils, glue, and maybe crayons, markers, or colored pencils will easily suffice.
Your child can either choose to make a collage out of his or her items, or for more of a challenge, you can glue a few items onto the page randomly and ask your child to incorporate them into his or her picture somehow. This is a fun(!) way to get your children thinking differently about items and more creatively about art.
RElated: Fun Activities for Social Distancing
- Slackline—
This is one of those camping activities that provides solid entertainment for your kids, especially if you join in! All you have to do is secure a slackline, or ratcheting tie down between two trees or posts between six inches and a foot off the ground, and watch as your kids try to walk the tight rope.
Add an imaginative element by grabbing a stick and pretending you are part of a circus act!
- Stick maze—
This is pretty easy to set up with your child. You can go for a walk and collect sticks of all sizes. My son loved playing with sticks when he was younger! Sticks have been so many different things, from light sabers, to fishing rods, to lion taming tools. You can play many different things with sticks!
Once you have a bunch of sticks, lay them out on the ground to make a maze for your child to go through. You can make it as difficult or as easy as you like, and sometimes, it’s great for older kids to set it up for the younger kids! Parents, if you are willing to go through it too, the kids who made it will feel even more confident!
- Tracking animals—
Did you know that tracking animals can help children learn to focus for longer periods of time? It boosts their spatial and scientific thinking as well as improving their symbolic thought. Depending on where you are camping, you may have many options for tracking, or very few. But even if you’re not in an area with a whole lot of wildlife to track, you can always find insects or birds to watch for a bit to get some of the same effects.
Take it to the next level by allowing your child to journal about her observations on a piece of paper. She can write about it, or draw pictures. That can help her learning stick longer (or as I learned, it goes from a blink, to a wink.)
For more on tracking animals and the ways it can benefit the brain, click here.
- Photography—
Let your kids take turns with the camera and hone their photography skills. You might be surprised at what great pictures they take! Kids generally have a different point of view, so sometimes they take pictures of unexpected things that turn out really well.
When my son was five, he took this great picture of a robin in our yard. The robin was on the ground and my son was able to sneak up on it. He was already way closer to the ground than an adult, so the picture was taken from a different angle than mine would have been. It wasn’t a brilliant, contest-winning photo or anything like that, but I remember being really surprised! When I turned him loose with the camera, I expected random shots of nostrils, (we’ve gotten those too!) finger over the lens pictures, and completely random items. Instead, he came back with this great photo of a robin!
These are camping activities for kids to stay busy with, but these activities are more fun if you join in! I love that we can do them just as easily in the backyard on a regular summer day.
We’re two weeks into our family-fun challenge! How are you doing? Tell me you haven’t given up! If you have, maybe every day is too much for you right now. That’s understandable! I’ve tried to do this challenge before and two weeks in was my breaking point. Here’s what I wish though. I wish I hadn’t given up, but instead, maybe just scaled back.
If you’re overwhelmed by doing one fun thing every day, dial it back to one fun thing every other day, or two or three fun things per week. The point is not to follow my exact schedule, but rather, to be intentional about scheduling time for family fun. There’s lots of time left this month to jump in if you haven’t already! We can do this!
RElated: Plan Your Own Summer Day Camp
