Six Ideas for Family Fun on a Budget

Spending time together as a family is important, but it doesn’t have to be expensive. Here are six ideas for family fun on a budget.

Six Ideas for Family Fun on a Budget

Family Game Night

Games are some of the best sources of fun for the whole family. Board games are an excellent example. If you’ve got any board games lying around, get them out and give them a whirl. Games like these encourage interaction between family members and help with bonding, which we often find ourselves doing too little of these days.

Apart from board games, other alternatives include card games (cards are readily available and cheap to get hold of. If you don’t know any good card games, it’s also easy to find the rules for some on the internet) and activities like charades. Family game nights are great for children of all ages – even teenagers will often take part (with a bit of resistance to begin with!)

Indoor Camping

For younger kids, something fun to do is building indoor camps. Get some clothes pegs, some strings, and some bed sheets and you can help your kids build their own bedroom camp. Once built, kids will often play in these for hours. Many kids also love to sleep over in their own home-built camp.

Get Crafty

Doing arts and crafts can be an inexpensive way to spend quality time together as a family.

Why not go on a nature walk with your kids and get them to collect interesting sticks, stones, shells, feathers etc. When you get home, you can work together to create a nature collage!

Coloring together is another fun way to be creative while spending quality time together.

Play Ball

Playing sports together is a great way to spend time together when the weather is good. Balls are cheap, and generally provide a lot of entertainment, as well as giving kids (including teenagers) a chance to blow off steam, use up energy and get some exercise all at once.

We have a box of sporting equipment that we frequently dig into when we have a few spare minutes. Tossing or kicking a ball with the kids is one of my husband’s favorite ways to spend a few minutes of quality time with them. Plus, it’s a great way to exercise together as a family and make fitness fun for the kids!

Host a Get-together with Friends

Let your kids invite a few friends over for the day. It’s true that sometimes a group of kids can end up causing a riot, but generally things don’t get out of hand and your kids will always have a lot of fun with a few friends around. The more friends there are, the more easily they come up with their own (usually free) entertainment. It’s a winning solution. And, if you really want to make the most of the opportunity, why not let your kids plan a feast and have their friends each bring something along to eat?

Get Cooking

Some kids will be more resilient to this idea than others, but many kids enjoy cooking once they get started. So why not try and teach your kids a bit about cooking? Make it fun for them in the process and they’ll love it. Pizzas are a great option as kids can decorate them any way they wish with the ingredients you’re using.