what indoor activities keep your boys occupied for hours?

[caedmyn]

Monday my boys got interested in coloring endless Dinotrucks pages and spent several hours coloring...and actually (mostly) stayed out of trouble.  This might be the secret to keeping them out of trouble, but I need ideas for indoor, fairly non-messy, non-Mom-intense activities that are likely to keep them busy for a long time (no screens either).  Any time they go outdoors they promptly find something they're not supposed to do and do it...yesterday it was flinging clumps of mud into the air conditioner while it was running.  They are 8, 6, and 4.  It's mostly the 8 & 6 YOs who need to be kept occupied...the 4 YO will tag along or find his own thing to do and he's somewhat better at staying out of trouble than they are.

[bettyandbob]

Legos get more and more complicated. My 22 year old still has Legos.

[Arcadia]

Legos and trains tracks are messy in my house.

 

My less messy options were

Scrabble

Boggle

Risk (less fun with 2 players but my kids can still play)

 

For solo playing, the Thinkfun games were nice but rather costly.

 

My oldest had also enjoyed drawing mazes for my youngest to solve. So reams of paper were used up.

[wendyroo]

My boys are the same ages.

 

They will play with Lego for hours and hours.  They also love Play Doh (a bit messier, but they will play for 2-3 hours and I can then help them get it cleaned up in ~15 minutes).  They will color/cut/tape for a while, but rarely more than 30ish minutes at a time.  The 6 and 8 year olds will sometimes play board games.  The 4 and 6 year olds will play with the wooden train tracks.  If I let them drag home a whole bunch of Star Wars twaddle books from the library, then those will keep them busy for about 45 minutes each afternoon.  Sometimes I throw the 4 and 6 year olds in the bathtub with non-bathtub toys (matchbox cars, Imaginext, cooking utensils, tin foil to make boats, etc) and that will keep them happily occupied for a couple hours.

 

Wendy

[Zinnia]

My 11 year old lies on the floor and moans and groans that life is unfair.  No joke.  He goes to public school (for this reason, chiefly).  He had 10 weeks off for summer.  By week NINE, he was bored enough that he started looking for a toy to play with.  He asked about toys that have been gone to Goodwill for 2+ years.  It takes a level of boredom that we can not keep up in order for him to look to entertain himself in any way.  

 

I have him cook and clean right alongside me, ask him to read when I'm reading, garden when I'm gardening.  About 80% of the time, he'll just go along with that, no questions asked, because it's easier than thinking of something himself.  So that's how I manage my hard case.   :)

 

My other kids entertain themselves better.  They listen to a lot of books on CD from the library.  My 9 year old does adult coloring books and color by numbers.  He has my old camera, and he tries to improve his photographs.  He draws and paints.  He likes legos, but he is super fast at the kits, so it gets pricey for the amount of time spent.  He will put together the trains for my younger two, but he doesn't really play.  

 

My 7 year old plays with toys.  He likes trains and especially matchbox cars.  He likes to build cities and roads and parking lots out of blue painters tape on the floor.  He likes playdoh, mostly with his cars. 

 

My 4 year old likes playdoh, toys (my first two are not toy players, so this was a huge thing to me), and any sort of drawing/coloring/painting and gluing. She also likes to take baths adn will spend a long time in there.  She plays a solitaire version of memory.  

 

My 3 younger kids can sometimes manage board games.  When my oldest is thrown in there, the board is getting turned over, and someone is going to get hit.  So we mostly avoid games.  :)

Edited August 17, 2017 by Zinnia

[whitestavern]

Legos!

[Elizabeth86]

Omg Im following. My 5, 4 and 1 yr are making me nuts right now. Im tired, pregnant and it has rained all dang week. We are so bored.

[ScoutTN]

Building toys - Legos now, Trios when he was younger, blocks sometimes. Even better with a basket of people and/or a bucket of hotwheels cars to add into the mix. 

 

Audiobooks!

Comic books.

Sculpey clay

 

[reign]

When my oldest was 8 and her sisters 7 and 5, there was nothing that could keep them busy for several hours! At least not anything clean and safe. Busy for an hour usually signified something horribly wrong. They were never bored though always had a new plan cooked up! We had to do a lot of supervised play. One clean thing they enjoyed was setting up ALL their toys in another room as a store. Then using crackers to buy back the toys. That sounds messy in hindsight...

[rose]

My first thought when I read the title question was to say that the only thing that entertains them for long is to be obnoxious.

 

Ds6 is my tough one. He has zero imagination. The following will entertain him for about 30 minutes at a time. He likes to draw pictures, to build things, crafts of all sorts but they usually take my involvement, playdoh, look at picture books or take a bath. His very favourite thing to do is to listen to audio books and play with an old cell phone that we gave him. He takes pictures on it and play with the ring tones. You've got to watch them though. The other day the phone got a BIG time out when I caught him taking a picture of DS2 posing nude!

[Lucy the Valiant]

chess

 

building things out of duct tape & PVC pipe (get books for this . . . AMAZING!)

 

Legos (check out books from library for super-complex and creative ideas . . . then add in stop-frame animation possibilities) . . . this can be expanded and classified as "school" if they re-create the characters from a read-aloud or audio book

 

games 

 

knot tying

 

train tracks (our Thomas the Tank Engine tracks have "grown up" to become mass transit systems and now military transport vehicles)

 

army guys (and building things to support / embellish the army guys)

 

board games: they once took a regular old Monopoly game and made it into Calvin & Hobbes-opoly (this took AGES - had to craft the figures out of Model Magic, design the "chance" cards, re-decorate the entire game, etc. . . . one of the best $2 I ever spent at the thrift store)

 

 

[happypamama]

You mean besides dumping stuff out and knocking things over?

 

LEGO/Duplo, marble run, blocks, train set, anything building related, cars, play kitchen, board games, card games, video games, art stuff, books, comic books, dinosaurs, building forts out of blankets and pillows, racing up and down the stairs playing tag, nerf guns, mini trampoline, kick dummy/punch pads (martial arts), puzzles, any sort of small toy guys, the Imaginext Batcave and assorted friends, audio books, programmable robot, SnapCircuits.

 

We have a lot of boys. Haha!

[Pink and Green Mom]

Some things mine liked at that age:

 

-Legos, matchbox cars, and those plastic green Army men 

-an old, outdated digital camera they used to make short "movies" or take a bunch of pictures

-a spy kit

-a magic set (this kept them busy for HOURS learning tricks and putting on magic shows for us - we must have seen the same 4 tricks 50 times)

-card games (War was a favorite)

-an old Spirograph set (remember those?)

-Bingo (although they would fight over who go to turn the machine and call out the numbers)

-jigsaw puzzles

-building forts

[Lady Florida.]

When my guy was little it was trains, Lego, Matchbox or Hot Wheels cars, and drawing. Mostly Lego and drawing. He loved both and would often hyper focus on one of those activities.

[PeterPan]

Duct tape.

String. 

 

We go to Dollar Tree and buy cheap things like that. He only plays with parts of things, so he can use duct tape to make parts into something new, which endlessly fascinates him. Also they have clamps that you can use to make forts to play with the things you made out of duct tape and string.

Edited August 17, 2017 by OhElizabeth

[TABmom]

It's only good once in a while, but giving them a cookie sheet covered with a thick layer of baking soda and little cups of colored vinegar and eyedroppers. They can make all these tiny colored volcanos. It's fun to watch the explosions and also the color mixing!! Unfortunately, not something you can pull out too often!

[Carrie12345]

My 10 and 6yos will stay entertained with Legos and Play Doh for quite a while. (They have lots of fancy/creative play doh accessories, thanks to a terrific co-op teacher.)  Both DO make a mess, but it's a small price to pay.

 

Last night, they had giant, empty boxes that they started playing with around 4 or 5pm, barely took a break for dinner, and then continued until after I had fallen asleep!  Dh was on his way home from picking up our daughter, so I figured he could wrestle them to bed. Instead, I found them asleep on the couch this morning, with the giant boxes next to them.

 

[Night Elf]

When my kids were young, I had a box of logic puzzle type games like Rush Hour. I know one site was Think Fun, but I know there was another and I'm just drawing a blank. 

 

There was this puzzle game called Squzzle. My kids loved these! I wasn't smart enough to do them.

 

Anyway it was all kinds of logic games. They played with those for hours. And they kept them in that one box so pieces wouldn't get lost.

Edited August 17, 2017 by Night Elf

[wendyroo]

Anyway it was all kinds of logic games. They played with those for hours. And they kept them in that one box so pieces wouldn't get lost.

 

Yes, logic games are also a hit around here.

 

Rush Hour Junior, Color Code, Laser Maze (which I held off on for a long time because it seemed so gimmicky, but has been played with a ton since one of the boys got it for Christmas last year).  I am considering getting Gravity Maze.

 

And our large collection of Snap Circuits get played with frequently and for long periods of time.

 

All of those are better for the 6 and 8 year olds, but the 4 year old watches and "helps" because he so wants to emulate the big boys.

 

Another thing that keeps all of them busy for periods of the day are chores.  Each of the boys have 7 weekly chores that each take about 20 minutes (less for the 4 year old's chores, and he still needs quite a bit of my help).  They are in charge of deciding when they are going to do their chores (one a day, several at once, etc) and how they will fit them into their day.

 

Wendy

[Ravin]

Without screens? Legos. Also DS spent one long day this summer building a fort in his room out of pillows, blankets, chairs, and other random objects.