TECH NOTES: Family Fun, Connecting Through Play

It’s so sad.  The last days (weeks) of Summer are here. 

With my daughter’s high school volleyball practices starting this week, it reminds me that she will begin her second year of high school in just two weeks.

Before too long, we will all be in the throes of school and the busyness of the Fall.  Before Summer gets away from you, here are some ways to unplug and connect with each other through family fun. 

Most of these activities you can do at home.  Oh, and these activities are family fun essentials for my clan.  These are our faves.

Family Fun Memory Making Ideas

1.  Play Board Games

Our family loves to play board games together.  We have favorites we’ve played over the years, some of which I had kept from my childhood.  Our family fun faves over the years have included:

• Candy Land
• Connect Four
• Guess Who?
• Break The Ice
• Uno
• Boggle
• Booby Trap
• SpotIt
• Life
• Clue
• Hangman
• Stay Alive
• Jenga
• Rush Hour
• Scrabble
• Monopoly
• Battleship
• The Inventors
• Pictionary
• Risk
• Werewolf
• Ticket To Ride

We have played all of these games and more through the years, starting when my kids were little to the teenagers they are today. 

We recently discovered Ticket To Ride.  We play almost every night, and often 2-4 times!  We are addicted.  Ticket to Ride is about building train routes between cities.  It’s a great game of strategy, timing, and learning where cities are located.

We also like to play a quick game or two of Spot-It right after dinner, it’s a lot of fun too.  And although not a board game, we enjoy cards – we can take them anywhere with us and there are so many games to play with them. 

Our latest faves are Spoons and Idiot.  We love Idiot because in this game, three of us win and only one person loses.

A note about competition.  If your kids tend to be competitive and fight and cry at the table when they lose or boast excessively after winning, this is common.  Trust me, it will seem like it’s not worth playing games with your kids with all the drama that ensues after a win or loss.  But it is worth it in the end. 

Playing games through the years with your kids gives you the opportunity to teach your kids about empathy, resilience, perseverance, attitude, playing fair, strategy, composure, resolution, and so much more!

My kids are young teenagers now.  We still have our hiccups sometimes, but it’s gotten a lot better.  It has been our hope that we can help our children through these emotions in the home so they can handle competition, winning, teamwork, and disappointment better when they are out on their own.

Board games are definitely a big part of our family fun together.

2.  Go to the Movies or Create Your Own Movie Theater

We don’t tend to make it out to the movies very often.  It’s always a thrill when we do, but truthfully, it seldom happens.  I like to hit the cheaper value movie theaters during summer – they are usually a bit further out and it makes for a fun outing.

Every once in a while we’ll go to the drive-in movies, which usually include a double feature.  This was a lot of fun when the kids were smaller and didn’t take up as much room in the back of our Ford Explorer.  We would all lie in the back with the tailgate up. 

Now that they are teenagers, they take up more room!  So now my husband take our camp chairs and blankets and let the kids have the back of the car.

My favorite resource to check out which movies are playing and where is the Fandango app.  You can also use it to see which movies are coming out down the road as well as what is playing now.  I also like to see the Rotten Tomatoes score and Fan Reviews for movies to decide if they are right for our family.

We often opt to catch up on movies at home.  Typically I’ll grab a DVD from our nearby Redbox, but lately, have realized that our local library has the latest movies.  I looked at our local library online and was able to reserve Pandora (it was checked out).  The library notified me when it was ready and I picked up Pandora (borrowed free for 7 days) and Wrinkle in Time ($1.50 for one day).  Score.

To create your own home movie theater, get lots of pillows, blankets, make popcorn, bring in your pets, and camp out for the evening.  Always fun.  Watching it outside is an added bonus!

3.  Play Pickleball or Tennis

So Pickleball is the latest outdoor sports sensation.  It’s a cross between tennis and badminton.  The paddles are made of either solid wood or plastic and the ball is more like a whiffle ball.  The court is smaller like a badminton court but resembles a tennis court.  It’s great exercise and something different to try.  

The downfall to pickleball is finding a court.  However, we are big fans of playing family sports close to our home.  Chalk works wonders in creating a court on our cul-de-sac and it’s a great exercise in measuring things out for the kids.  We haven’t tried it yet, but I’m planning on it now!

You can buy a pickleball set for less than $50 at Walmart to try it out.  Set it up in the yard, driveway, or street, it looks pretty versatile. 

We like to play tennis at our local community park, the tricky part is getting there before someone else snags the court.  Fortunately, our park also has basketball, so we can play Around the World while we wait.

4.  Go on a Hike or Bike Ride

Check to see what local hikes might be nearby your city.  We are fortunate to have a mountain range near our home, but when the kids were younger, there was a big hill behind our grocery store. We decided to explore to see if we could hike to the top to see an overview of that part of our city.

Along the way, we found a bush with thousands of ladybugs on it.  It was such a thrill to play with them and then hike to the top.  My son was young, probably four and my daughter was seven, but we made it.  

Even if it’s a “hike” in your local park, the idea of hiking can be fun for kids.

We have a park about a 1/2 mile away from our home.  Our family loves to bike down to the park during the summer months.  We pack tennis rackets, our croquet set, and sometimes a picnic lunch!

5. Plan a Picnic

A picnic is synonymous with family fun! We often do many of these events together – sports, picnics, tennis, playing catch, etc.  Just a couple of backpacks packed full of our sports equipment and we are on our way.  Earlier this year, our kids planned out a picnic for us.

They packed all of our favorite gear (croche, lawn darts, baseballs and mitts, blankets, pillows, dinner, plastic utensils, and even ice cream for our first family picnic of the year.

We had fun enjoying mother nature and playing games.  We like to have picnics right around 6pm, when it’s cooler out and there’s a breeze.  When it gets dark, we leave.

Don’t feel like leaving the house?  Then don’t.  Try a picnic in your backyard.  When my kids were small, I’d make a picnic right on our family room floor.  I’d spread out the blanket and we all ate there, the kids loved it.

6.  Make a Museum Day

Museums are a great way to spend the day and get out of the heat.  Whether it’s a local museum or your city’s science museum, museums bring about a sense of adventure and exploration. 

We live about 35 minutes away from downtown LA  (without traffic!), so there are a ton of museums located near one another.  I try to plan on going to a couple on one day.  There’s no need to see everything on every floor, just spend time in the areas that interest us the most.

Many museums have special days when they are open for free.  And some companies have arrangements where you can go to certain museums free (for cardholder only) once a month too, like Bank of America and Chase.

7.  Play Iron Chef at Home

We’ve done this a number of times and it’s like family fun on steroids.  Every family member needs to create a meal around thee particular ingredients and anything else we can find in the house.  Everyone is welcome to use any of the appliances, pots, or pans in the kitchen.

The total time to make a serving of a meal is one hour and all three ingredients must be used in their dish.  Usually one of the ingredients is a meat (typically raw chicken) and the other two could be anything you want – broccoli, breadcrumbs, yogurt, peas, parmesan cheese, vanilla coffee creamer, you name it.

Everyone must stop after the time is up.  At this point, we test each other’s dishes and judge (using points from 1, lowest to 5 highest) each dish based on:

1.  Appearance
2.  Taste
3.  Display
4.  How well they explain their dish

It’s a fun exercise in creativity, cooking, and perseverance.  We have come up with some really good recipes and it makes cooking fun.  We’ve tried this game at my son’s cooking themed birthday party too, the boys had a great time.

8.  Play Catch & Hitting Balls

A few years ago when I was a Walmart Mom ambassador, I wrote an article on a ball pitching machine.  Little did I know it would become one of our favorite outdoor activities.  We set it up on the driveway and tried to hit the balls with a baseball bat in the street. 

The balls are pretty small, so a lot of them tend to get past the batter.  I bought baseball mitts for the whole family so we can collect the balls to put in the pitching machine for the next batter.  Sometimes our neighborhood kids come out to play too.  

We also love throwing a softball to each other in the street or at the park.  It’s surprising how fun it is…and good exercise when the ball isn’t caught and goes rolling.  Right after dinner is the perfect time to throw some balls.

9.  Host a Family Olympics

Ask your kids to put together a family fun Olympics.  It can be one day or spread out over a week or two.  The kids are in charge of choosing the games and keeping score.  They can choose team games, board games, sports games, Nerf war games, video games, whatever they want.

Your kids will take a lot of pride in creating the Olympics and will love coming up with the scoreboards to score the winners from each match.  Creativity is important to the development of your children’s minds.  Do whatever you can to encourage creativity and play.

10.  Family Nerf Gun Wars

My son loves his Nerf guns, he must have over 10 of them.  Every once in a while, we have a Nerf gun war.  We all get to pick our top 2 Nerf guns from his collection and we split up all of the Nerf bullets (bought them in bulk on eBay).  We choose two teams of 2 and each team is given a flag.

Our objective is to hide our flag within our own territory and each team needs to capture the flag of the other team before getting shot 3 times.  Once a team member gets shot 3 times, they are placed in the other team’s jail.  To get out, your team member must get up to the jail room and tag your hand without getting shot first.

To add an extra element to the war, we play at night with the lights off.  Each person gets a mini flashlight.  The game is over when a flag is captured.  We usually play with one team upstairs and one team downstairs.  Getting up or down the stairs to capture a flag is no easy feat.

If you want to get your adrenaline going, this is the game!  It’s always a lot of fun and it goes faster once someone makes it to the top or bottom of the stairs.

OK, I’ve let out all of our family fun secrets now.  Now you know the top 10 ways we love to have family fun together…besides going on vacation! 

We all know once school starts, finding family fun time can be tough.  Make the most of your Summer with your family to create lasting memories and new traditions.