Rainy Day Fun with the Grands

You have your grands after school, or for a surprise Saturday visit, but you're stuck in the house? And you have exhausted all your usual indoor activities? I've got some ideas for you.

Get out your flashlight/s and begin!

First suggestion: Go for a search in the dark.

This activity is kind of like an Easter egg hunt, but it's in a darkened room, no eggs are involved, and your grandchildren have to have flashlights. Flashlights just add to the fun. You simply hide some items available around your house. It can be anything really. At Christmas we hide Christmas bows in the dark. You can hide ABC blocks if you have them in your toy chest when the kids come to visit. It so happens that at my house, my grandson had a set of small toy dinosaurs which we choose to hide. When he was younger, we used to say we were going on a dinosaur hunt. And you can add to the fun by letting your grandchild hide the items for you sometimes--they seem to enjoy that as well. I'll let these photos tell the story.

Some tiny dinosaurs my grandson collected from a gum ball machine. Okay, okay, there's one ninja in this collection. :)

We store them in a tin box we got at a dollar store.

Hide them about the darkened room.

Grandson finding one of the dinos by shining the flashlight on it.

Second suggestion: look for flashcards in the dark.

My grandson comes to our home after school. This was a suggestion from his first grade teacher as a way to practice his sight words. You might remember from school or from your own children learning to read--sight words are high-frequency words that you just have to know by sight--a child really cannot "sound them out." In school now they are often called popcorn words because they pop up in your reading a lot. The teacher's suggestion was to make flashcards with them and post on the wall. Then darken the room and give your child a flashlight. You can do several things with them--call out a word and they have to find it with their flashlight; they can read all the words as they shine a light on them. Or you can shine the flashlight on the card and they have to read it. It's such a simple activity, but my seven-year-old grandson loves it.

You might not have flashcards to do this activity, but searching for anything could be a fun rainy day activity. Perhaps you could play eye-spy in a dark room with a flashlight. One idea always leads to another. . .

Sight words we taped to the wall. By using Scotch tape, we discovered that tape did not damage the wall.

For some reason, when we photographed the beam of the flashlight on the card, it did not photograph well, but you get the idea. Call out a word and he has to shine the light on the card.

Third suggestion: create constellation shape on paper, place on flashlight and project on wall or ceiling. 

Rather than try to recreate what we did, I'll just share the PBS website from which we got this idea. It's a good one too, and is perfect for a rainy day.

​www.pbs.org/video/flashlight-constellations-fkad7b/

​Spring break is coming! It just might be that you FINALLY get to see your kids. And as always seems to happen during spring break, it just might rain. Now you have some rainy day fun with these suggestions. Until next week!

Remember~ 

An hour with your grandchildren can make you feel young again!

Yes, of course. Making scary faces in the dark with a flashlight is fun too!