Camping Activities to Use at Home or at Camp

If your family likes camping but you aren’t able to get out as much as you would like, some at-home camping activities can be a fun substitute. Or if your little ones are new to camping and you want to explore it, try making a fake campfire, cooking some indoor s’mores and having a day of camping related activities. Of course you can also use these when you’re camping if you want to add to the experience.

If you’re looking for more camping ideas, check out my roundup of camping activities for kids.

Crafting a Lovely Life has some really cute camping coloring pages you can use at home or when you’re traveling to or at a campsite, too. And Growing Up Gabel has a fun camping themed I spy printable.

These camping riddles are meant to be used as part of a camp site scavenger hunt, but if you’re at home you can also just ask the questions and see if kids know the answers. You can find the printables at The Crazy Outdoor Mama.

Talk about what might happen on a camping trip, or tell stories of trips you’ve been on before, with DIY camping themed story stones. These are easy to make with instructions from Crafts on Sea, and kids are sure to use them to tell other stories as well.

3 Dinosaurs has some camping themed sequencing cards that would be good to use with little ones who’ve never been camping before to help them see the sequence of events (pitching the tent, having s’mores, getting in the tent and getting in the sleeping bag).

Happy Mom Hacks has a paid collection of more than 30 printables for camping, lots of which could also be used at home. There are riddles, trivia, matching games, word searches, tic tac toe boards, and more active games like scavenger hunts, minute to win it games, social bingo and more.

You may not actually see animals or tracks if you go camping for real, but this animal track matching game from Adventure in a Box is a fun way to talk about habitats and the traces that animals leave, whether you’re in the woods or your own backyard.

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Activities to Do While Camping with Kids

When my daughter was young she loved the PBS show “Peg + Cat,” and if you’ve got a fan of that show in your house this activity will be even better, but it doesn’t matter if your kids don’t already know these characters to learn about fractions with pizza.

There’s an episode of “Peg + Cat” where they are working in a pizza place and have to divide pies to put different kinds of toppings of different parts of the pie (there’s also an online game with the same concept, which I can’t believe still exists because my kiddo played it years ago).

Inspired by the episode and a companion book, Nature Homeschool developed an activity for learning about fractions and entrepreneurship using pizza. They developed a pizza shop and used the printables and teaching guide from Teacher Vision to learn more about fractions using pizza as the foundation. Their post also has a pizza order form printable you can use when you role play a pizza shop.

The Inspiration Edit also has some cute printable worksheets using a pizza to learn about fractions. And Life Over Cs has some fun printable pizza fraction activities, such as the printable fraction memory game shown here.

If you want to increase the pretend play factor with this one, you can make a pizza and toppings out of paper, cardboard or felt. Or use a paper plate as your crust and simple shapes cut out of paper to be toppings. The pretend play pizza making kit from Glued to My Crafts uses an individual slice, but you could do the same thing with a whole pie’s worth of slices.

Kids Craft Room has another fun pizza play food idea, this time using salt dough for the crust. The toppings are made out of felt so you can practice putting different toppings on a fraction of the pizza and learn as you play.

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