Looking for rainy day activities for kids usually happens at about half past nine in the morning, when it has already been raining for an hour, everyone is indoors, and the day ahead looks impossibly long. What you get back is a list of sixty ideas, most of which need something you do not own, and by the time you have read to number forty someone has emptied a drawer onto the floor.
So I built a planner instead of a list. Answer seven questions and it gives you a paced plan for the day: your children’s ages, the supplies you can actually put your hands on, how much energy you have left, and whether you are willing to go outside. It puts the loud things and the calm things in the right order, tells you what time each one starts, and prints out so you can stick it on the fridge.
Everything the planner is built on is written out below, sorted by age, by what you have in the house, and by how much of you it needs. If you would rather just read and pick, it is all here.
How to plan a rainy day so it does not fall apart by lunchtime
The reason wet days go wrong is almost never a shortage of ideas. It is sequencing. Most days collapse because a child who has not moved for two hours is asked to sit and do a craft, or because the biggest, best activity gets used at ten in the morning and there is nothing left for the long grey stretch after lunch.
Four things fix it, and they are the rules the planner follows.
Start with movement, not with sitting. Whatever you had planned first, put fifteen minutes of something physical in front of it. Children who have been indoors overnight are carrying energy that has nowhere to go, and until it goes, nothing that requires concentration will work. Ten minutes of freeze dance genuinely buys you forty minutes of drawing afterwards.
Alternate loud and quiet. Not two active things in a row, and never two quiet things in a row. The rhythm matters more than the individual activities, and it is the single biggest difference between a wet day that works and one that ends in tears at four o’clock.
Anchor the day with food. A snack at a fixed time and a lunch that everyone helps make are not gaps between activities, they are the structure. On a day with no school run, no clubs and no outings, meals are the only fixed points a child has, and without them the hours smear into one long undifferentiated stretch.
If your children do better seeing the day laid out rather than being told it, a visual schedule for kids turns the plan into pictures they can follow themselves, which removes most of the what-are-we-doing-now questions. On a day with no school run, a daily routine chart does the same job for the parts that stay fixed whatever the weather.
Save something for the last hour. The stretch between about four and six in the evening is the hardest part of a wet day, when everyone is tired, the light has gone and dinner is not ready. Do not spend your best idea in the morning. Deliberately hold one thing back.
One more thing, which is less of a rule and more of a mindset. A rainy day does not have to be a good day. It has to be a day that gets through without anybody being shouted at. Lowering the bar is a legitimate strategy and it is usually the correct one.
What to do on a rainy day when you have nothing left
Some wet days arrive when you are ill, working, heavily pregnant, or simply finished. Every list of things to do on a rainy day assumes an adult with the energy to set up a craft table, and on these days that adult does not exist.
These are the activities that need almost nothing from you once they have started.
- A blanket den over the dining table. Building it counts as the activity, and once it exists they will stay in it far longer than you expect. Leave it up all day.
- An audiobook and a floor picnic. A blanket on the floor, snacks laid out properly, a story playing, everybody lying down. Nobody has to be quiet, and almost everybody goes quiet.
- A bath in the middle of the day. Cups, a jug, a colander, a whisk, some bubbles. Not a wash, a play. Forty minutes, and you can sit on the floor next to it.
- A muffin tin and a bowl of buttons, pasta or bottle tops for sorting. A toddler past the stage of putting things in their mouth will do this at a table, alone, for half an hour.
- The jigsaw that is too hard, spread out somewhere it can stay all day. Nobody has to finish it.
- Twenty questions. No setup, no equipment, and it works while you are cooking.
For a child who will write rather than play, a page of journal prompts for kids needs nothing from you at all beyond handing over a pen.
The planner has a setting for this. Choose “running on empty” and it removes everything that requires supervision or preparation, and builds the day out of the list above.
Rainy day activities for toddlers
One and two year olds need repetition and physical input more than they need novelty. An activity a toddler will repeat thirty times is worth more than a clever one they abandon after a minute, and indoor activities for toddlers work best when they involve carrying, pouring, filling and emptying.
Move the pom-poms. A pile of socks or crumpled paper at one end of the room, an empty bowl at the other, and they have to be carried across one at a time. Then on a spoon. Then balanced on a head. It sounds like nothing and it absorbs them completely.
The pillow drag. They sit on a large cushion or a folded duvet and you pull them the length of the hall. Then they drag a teddy. Heavy pulling and pushing calms an overstimulated small child faster than anything else, and it is the thing to reach for when a toddler has gone past tired into wild.
A sensory tray. A deep tray of dry rice, flour or lentils, with cups, spoons and small toys buried in it. Put the whole thing inside a laundry basket or on an old sheet and the clean-up is one shake outside the back door.
Animal races down the hallway, as a crab, then a bear, then a very slow snail. Five minutes of this costs you nothing and buys back a calm half hour.
Guess the sound, with everyone’s eyes shut while one person rattles keys or opens a crisp packet. It is a rare quiet game a toddler can win against an older sibling.
Indoor activities for preschoolers
Three and four year olds have crossed into pretend play, which changes what works. Give them a role rather than a task and the same activity lasts three times as long.
Run a cafe. They write the menu, take your order, do the pricing and deliver the food. You are the customer and you should be demanding about it. Give them real coins, because handling money is what stretches this from ten minutes to forty.
A hospital for the toys, with bandages torn from kitchen roll, a waiting room and a clipboard. Every teddy in the house has something wrong with it. This one is especially good if there is a real appointment coming up that they are anxious about.
Cushion floor is lava, with cushions and sofa seats laid out as islands. They will rearrange the route themselves, which is most of the activity.
Salt dough, made from two cups of flour, one cup of salt and one cup of water. Model it in the morning, bake it low for a couple of hours, paint it in the afternoon. One setup, two activities, several hours apart.
Shadow puppets cut from card and taped to pencils, with a lamp pointed at a pale wall. Best saved for late afternoon when it is getting dark, which is exactly when a wet day starts to drag.
Inside activities for kindergarteners and 5 to 6 year olds
At five and six, children can follow a rule properly and they want to win something. Anything with a score, a timer or a leaderboard will hold them far longer than the same activity without one.
Indoor bowling with ten empty bottles and a rolled pair of socks, scored on paper across ten frames. A little water in each bottle makes them harder to knock down and doubles how long the game lasts.
An obstacle course they design themselves: chairs to crawl under, cushions to jump between, a rolled towel to balance along. Time each run and write the times down. The stopwatch is what turns ten minutes of interest into forty.
Paper aeroplanes, three designs each, raced down the hallway for distance, for time in the air, and for the most ridiculous flight path. Then tweak and race again, because the tweak-and-race loop is what makes it last.
Thirty circles drawn on a page, turned into as many recognisable things as possible in three minutes. Count them and try to beat the score next time.
A treasure hunt with five written clues around the house, each pointing to the next. Ten minutes of writing from you buys half an hour, and once they have done one they will write the next one for you.
Things to do inside for 7 to 12 year olds
Older children are the hardest group on a wet day, because the obvious suggestions feel babyish to them and they know it. What works is anything with genuine difficulty, real responsibility, or a proper audience.
The long board game, the one that never comes out because it takes three hours. Today there is time. Set it up somewhere it can stay if it does not get finished.
A card game tournament across three different games with points carried between them, a written leaderboard and a final. The scoreboard is what converts twenty minutes of cards into a whole afternoon.
Build a marble run from kitchen roll tubes and cut-up boxes taped to a wall, where a marble has to get from top to bottom without leaving the track. Expect the first four attempts to fail, and let them fail.
Make a book: five sheets folded and stapled, with a cover, a title, an author name and a dedication. Once the cover exists they will not abandon it.
If drawing is their thing, a 30 day drawing challenge gives one wet afternoon a reason to become a habit, and they can carry it on after the rain stops.
Write the news. A front page about today in this house, with a headline, a report, a weather section and an interview with somebody. Film the broadcast at the end, which is what makes them write the article properly first.
Learn one card trick and perform it after dinner. Older children who are refusing everything else will usually agree to this.
Rainy day activities for mixed ages
If you have a toddler and a nine year old in the same house, most activity lists are useless, because an activity pitched at either one will lose the other within a minute. The trick is not to find something in the middle. It is to find activities where being small is not a disadvantage, or where the older child gets a different job.
Balloon keepy-uppy is the best mixed-age activity there is. One balloon, it must not touch the floor, everybody counts together. A one year old and a twelve year old can genuinely play it at the same time.
Blindfold drawing, where one person describes an object without naming it and everyone else draws it with their eyes shut. Nobody is good at it, which is precisely why it works across ages.
Memory tray, with fifteen objects to look at for a minute and then recall. Small children are frequently better at this than adults, and they know it.
Putting on a show, where the older ones direct and the younger ones perform. The rehearsal takes most of the time, which is the useful part.
The other approach is to give the older child a real job: running the cafe, being the quizmaster, reading to the little one, or teaching them a skill. Being in charge of something is far more appealing at nine than any craft you could offer.
The planner marks every activity that works for all your children at once, so on a mixed-age day you can see at a glance which blocks will hold everybody.
Going out in the rain: outdoor activities for kids on a wet day
Almost every list of rainy day activities assumes that outside is closed. It is not, and twenty minutes in the rain is frequently the thing that saves the entire day. Children who have been indoors all morning do not need another indoor activity, they need weather.
Serious puddle jumping, where every puddle on the route has to be jumped in and you steer them around nothing. Set the bath running before you leave, and coming home soaked becomes a non-event rather than a crisis.
Stick boat races in a gutter, a stream or any slope with water running down it. Everyone drops a stick or a leaf at the same line and chases it. A kerbside gutter after heavy rain works as well as countryside.
Dam building anywhere water runs downhill. Stones, sticks and mud, then breach it, then build a better one. It is engineering and physics disguised as getting filthy, and it will hold children for forty minutes.
Worm and snail patrol, because rain brings everything to the surface. The best hunting is in the ten minutes just after the rain stops.
If they want to record what they find rather than just count it, nature journaling gives the walk a second half that happens indoors afterwards.
A mud kitchen with an old saucepan, a wooden spoon and permission. Soup and potions made of mud, grass and petals. Hose the pots at the end and leave them out for next time.
Wet chalk on the path, which goes brighter and thicker than it does on dry ground, and which the rain washes off for you.
And when you have no waterproofs and no appetite for any of it, there is the two-minute rain run: out of the door with no coats, once round the garden or the block, and straight back in to dry clothes and a hot drink. It takes two minutes and it breaks a stuck afternoon completely. Keep it in reserve for the moment when nothing indoors is working.
Rainy day games that need nothing at all
Free indoor activities for kids, in the literal sense that they require no equipment, no preparation and no shopping. These are the ones worth memorising.
- Freeze dance, where whoever wobbles gets to control the music, which is the job they all actually want.
- Traffic lights: green is running on the spot, amber is walking, red is freeze, and purple is lie down, which is the one you call when you need thirty seconds.
- Simon says, where every instruction is physical. Ten star jumps, run to the kitchen and back, spin round four times.
- Hide and seek with a small object rather than a person, which works in a flat where there is nowhere for a person to hide.
- Sock basketball into a laundry basket, with a tape line that moves back a step every time somebody scores.
- Build the tallest tower from anything that stacks, measured against the wall in pencil each time.
- Consequences, where each person writes one line of a story, folds the paper over and passes it on.
- Twenty questions, which needs nothing and works while you are doing something else.
Things to make on a wet day
A cardboard box is the best rainy day resource in the house and it is free. One large box becomes a car, a rocket, a shop or a post office. Cut the door and the windows yourself and then hand it over completely, and do not improve their decorating. A good box gets played with for days, not hours.
Junk modelling from the recycling works on the same principle. Empty it onto the floor and set one rule: build a machine that does an imaginary job, and it must have a name. Ask what it does rather than what it is, because the answer is usually the best thing that happens all day.
Beyond that: a comic strip on a page folded into six boxes, which works because six small boxes are far less intimidating than one blank page. Collage from an old catalogue, with the theme agreed before any cutting starts. Painting with anything except brushes, using forks, sponges, potato halves and toy car wheels. And drawing the view from the window as it is now, then as it would be in summer, at night, and in a hundred years.
If nobody can think what to draw, the what should I draw wheel will pick for them, and the art prompt generator does the same for older children who want something with more in it.
Rainy day activities in the kitchen
Kitchen activities are the most valuable slot in any wet-day plan, because they are the ones that also feed everybody. That is two problems solved with one setup.
Bake something that needs waiting. Bread, buns, anything with proving or cooling time, because on a long wet day the waiting is a feature rather than a problem. Weighing is the part young children like most, so let it be slow and slightly inaccurate.
Pizza faces, where everyone builds their own on a muffin half or a wrap out of whatever is in the fridge, and then it is lunch.
A hot chocolate bar with little bowls of marshmallows, sprinkles, a crumbled biscuit and some cinnamon, so everyone builds their own. Save it for the late afternoon slump, which is the hardest hour of the day.
A blindfolded taste test of five things from the cupboard, scored out of five, including one thing that is genuinely horrible. Fussy eaters will try things during this that they would refuse at a meal, because it is a game.
Playdough made from a cup of flour, half a cup of salt, a spoon of oil and warm water added slowly. Making it is half the activity, and it keeps for weeks in a sealed tub, which means you are also stocking up for the next wet day.
Build a rainy day box before you need it
The single most useful thing in this entire article is not an activity. It is a box in a cupboard that you assemble on a dry day and open only when it rains.
The reason is simple: the moment you need rainy day activities is the moment you have the least capacity to plan them. If the thinking is already done and the materials are already together, you skip the worst part, which is standing in the kitchen at nine in the morning trying to invent a day out of nothing.
What goes in it: a pack of balloons, a roll of masking tape, string, a few sheets of stickers, a new pack of felt tips, some paper plates, a bag of pom-poms or cotton wool, a deck of cards, a pad of paper nobody has drawn on yet, and one small thing they have never seen before. Keep a large cardboard box flattened behind a wardrobe alongside it.
Two rules make it work. It only comes out when it rains, so the contents stay novel. And you replace what gets used the following week, so it is never empty on the day you need it.
Do the same with a wet weather bag by the door: wellies, waterproof trousers, a spare pair of socks and an old towel in a bag. Most families skip going outside not because they object to rain but because assembling the kit takes fifteen minutes they do not have. Assemble it once and the twenty-minute puddle walk becomes something you can do on impulse.
Keep a summer bucket list in the same box. Half of it will be indoor things you had forgotten you wanted to do, and a wet day is exactly when you go looking.
Frequently asked questions
What can kids do on a rainy day?
The reliable answer is a mix rather than a single activity: something physical to burn energy, something creative, something in the kitchen, something quiet, and if you can face it, twenty minutes outside in the rain. What fails is picking one activity and hoping it fills six hours. A wet day needs five or six shorter blocks with food between them, which is what the planner above builds for you.
What to do on a rainy day with no toys or supplies?
Some of the best wet-day activities need nothing at all. Freeze dance, traffic lights, hide and seek with a small object rather than a person, sock basketball into a laundry basket, building the tallest possible tower out of anything that stacks, twenty questions, and guess the sound with everyone’s eyes closed. Cushions, a bedsheet and a cardboard box will carry an entire day between them, and none of those count as toys.
How do I entertain a toddler and an older child at the same time?
Look for activities where being small is not a disadvantage. Balloon keepy-uppy is the best of these, because a one year old and a twelve year old can genuinely play it together. Blindfold drawing and memory games work for the same reason. The other approach is to give the older child a real job rather than an activity: running the pretend cafe, being the quizmaster, or teaching the little one something. Being in charge is far more appealing at nine than any craft.
Should we go outside if it is raining?
If you have the kit, yes. Twenty minutes of puddle jumping very often resets a day that indoor activities cannot fix, because children who have been inside all morning need weather rather than another activity. Set the bath running before you leave and the wet clothes stop being a problem. If you have no waterproofs, the two-minute rain run works: out with no coats, once round the block, straight back into dry clothes and a hot drink.
What are good rainy day activities for toddlers specifically?
One and two year olds want repetition and physical input rather than novelty. Carrying objects across a room one at a time, pouring dry rice between cups, being dragged along the hall on a cushion, animal races, and a sensory tray inside a laundry basket. An activity a toddler repeats thirty times is worth more than a clever one they abandon after a minute.
How do I stop the day falling apart in the afternoon?
Do not spend your best idea in the morning. The stretch between roughly four and six is the hardest part of a wet day, when everyone is tired and the light has gone, so hold something back for it deliberately. Put a snack at a fixed time in the middle of that stretch, and follow it with something physical rather than something calm. Most late-afternoon meltdowns are unspent energy rather than tiredness.
Is it bad to use screens on a rainy day?
No, and treating it as a failure tends to make the day worse rather than better. What makes a difference is using a screen deliberately instead of surrendering to one: choose the thing together, agree how long it will last before it starts, and sit down for the first five minutes. Announcing the ending in advance removes most screen arguments, which are usually about the surprise rather than the screen.
What should go in a rainy day box?
Balloons, masking tape, string, stickers, a new pack of felt tips, paper plates, pom-poms, a deck of cards, a fresh pad of paper and one small thing they have never seen before. Keep a flattened cardboard box with it. Two rules make it work: it only comes out when it rains, so the contents stay novel, and you replace whatever gets used the following week.
How long should each activity last?
Shorter than you think, and shorter for younger children. Fifteen to twenty minutes for a toddler, twenty to thirty for a preschooler, and up to an hour for an older child on something with real difficulty in it. The most common planning mistake is expecting one activity to fill a whole morning. Plan five short blocks rather than two long ones, and stop each one while they are still enjoying it.
What can we do on a rainy day without making a mess?
Blanket dens, audiobooks with a floor picnic, jigsaws, card games, memory trays, reading nests, window watching with a tally, twenty questions, charades and learning a card trick. All of them need no wiping, hoovering or bathing afterwards. If you set the mess tolerance to none in the planner above, it builds the entire day from activities like these.
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