Bored meeting, part 2 In our second instalment of things to do this summer, show your kids shooting stars and play live-action Angry Birds, among other ideas By: AV Kitching Posted: 5:10 PM CDT Monday, Jul. 21, 2025

School’s been out for the summer for almost a month, and if your children are anything like my kid, you’ve no doubt heard “I’m bored” or its cousin, “There’s nothing to do,” far too many times already.

If they’ve whizzed through your list of carefully planned activities, eaten all the snacks in your well-stocked cupboards and are now prowling the house like feral creatures in need of stimulation, worry no more.

Here’s Part 2 of your tear-out-and-keep list of 25 things to do with your kids this summer holidays (which you can, with some clever rejigging, use in autumn, winter and even spring). And while it’s by no means exhaustive, it’s definitely a start. (Asterisked suggestions require minimal or no adult participation or supervision.)

Thought of something we’ve missed? Email av.kitching@freepress.mb.ca with your suggestions.

PLAY INDOORS

1. Create a mini-survey with five questions, then make a chart or graph from the answers.

2. Find an unused box and transform into into a house for a doll, beloved toy or little figurine. Furnish it with random bits like tissue paper for pillows, popsicle sticks glued together for furniture and soft scrap paper for blankets.

3. Write your own newspaper based on events and activities of the previous day. Interview members of your immediate and extended family and friends for comments and illustrate reports with sketches and drawings.

4. Make an ice-cream sundae station with different flavours of ice creams, sauces and toppings.

5. Kids are the parents. You get to be the boss for the day, making decisions on everything from what your parents wear and where they go to what they will eat throughout the day. (Feeling brave? Parents can also take this outside and set a budget where kids decide how to spend the day’s allowance. Just make sure to set some ground rules.)

6. Let your parents introduce you to their favourite movie when they were your age and watch it together.

7 * Draw a self-portrait or portrait of your grandparents or your pet in the style of a famous artist.

8. * Have a fashion show in your living room. Create a runway space with chairs, dress in your snazziest and most outlandish clothes and strut your way down the runway as your favourite tunes play. For added glitz and glam, make sure you take photos everyone’s looks. (Parents can be photographers.)

GET OUTDOORS

9. Make pretend cakes using kinetic sand and decorate with seashells, leaves, rocks, fallen flower petals, twigs and even bits of grass.

10. Have a waterplay day. Get your hose and buckets out, dig out your clean kitchen sponges and get wet!

11. Plant herb box or windowsill garden.

12. Create your own Angry Birds game in real life with boxes and stuffies. Try to knock them down with a medium-sized bean bag.

13. Make a fairy rock garden with soil, pebbles and toys like doll’s house furniture.

14. Playground crawl. Check out all the playgrounds in your neighborhood or venture to a different/new to you area to discover the playgrounds there.

15. Dice walk. Roll the dice and let it make the decisions. Turn left if it lands on an even number, turn right on an odd; if it lands on a six, retrace your steps, walk backwards or skip to the nearest stop sign. Remember to watch out for traffic at all times.

16. Get into your PJs and go for a night drive, either in the city or out in the country.

17. Play I Spy — it’s a classic game, but if you want to change things up, use colours instead of letters as clues.

18. Camp in your garden. Who says you need to be out in the bush to have a good time sleeping under the stars? Just set tents up in your backyard, make s’mores (be sure to abide by provincial fire regulations) and snuggle under the stars. Best of all? You can pop back into the house when you need to use the bathroom.

19. Write a postcard to your best friend, stick a stamp on it and walk to the mailbox to send it to them.

20. Make paint from chalk. Carefully grate washable chalk onto plates, mix in some water and get painting on fences, walls and pavements.

21. Have a water-balloon fight.

Personal recommendations

22. Chasing Shooting Stars

On a clear, dark night, far from the light pollution of the city, you can sometimes see streaks of light shoot across the sky. These are meteors, also known as shooting stars or falling stars. They’re not related to stars, though — they are tiny pieces of interplanetary dust about the size of a grain of sand, crashing into Earth and burning up in our atmosphere. If you watch the sky carefully, you will see a few every hour, but don’t blink or you’ll miss them!

Around Aug. 11-12, though, the Earth goes through a lot of extra dust — like an interplanetary dust bunny. This event, called the Perseid meteor shower, can raise the rates to one every few minutes — and it’s even better after 2 a.m. You might also see satellites, which look like stars that slowly move across the sky.

— Scott D. Young, Planetarium astronomer at the Manitoba Museum

23. Secrets in Stone

Love fossils? While you’re walking around the city this summer, check out the many buildings constructed with Tyndall stone. This fossil-rich limestone is sourced from just north of Winnipeg and has been recognized as a Global Heritage Stone Resource, owing to its widespread use in architecture. Look carefully and you can find marine fossils dating back 450 million years, including corals, sponges, snails, trilobites, and ancient squid relatives. Good places to search include the walls of the Manitoba Museum — which also has associated displays — the Manitoba Legislative Building, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and even the many stone walls around the Forks.

— Joseph Moysiuk, curator of paleontology & geology, Manitoba Museum

24. Al fresco artistry

One of my favourite things to do in the summer with my niece is create art en plein air, a.k.a. outside! My niece is nine years old, incredibly creative, and loves trying new things. So to get a fresh perspective, we might read up on an artist or technique and then take our craft supplies outdoors. Last summer, we drew pencil-crayon flowers from the garden and then on a rainy day, we decided to recreate those flower drawings using tissue paper and pipe cleaners to add some permanent colour and florals to my dining room.

— Katryna Barske, WAG-Qaumajuq

25. Do nothing. Yep, that’s right. Nothing at all.

— with files from F. Kitching, 9

av.kitching@freepress.mb.ca