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.

Learning numbers actually involves a few different skills, from recognizing the shape of the number and knowing the word that goes with it to understanding one to one correspondence for counting and what order the numbers go in.

A lot of this is learned best through play and activities that get kids counting and tracing and otherwise interacting with numbers. These activities can help.

I specifically mentioned tracing above because of these number formation rhymes cards from Teaching Mama, which can be used in lots of ways to practice making the shapes of the numbers, including tracing, lining up items on the number shapes (and counting them!), using playdough to shape the numbers and so on. Each number has a little rhyme to help you remember how to make it, which is cute.

And speaking of playdough, you can find lots of playdough number mats with different themes for kids to use as they learn about numbers. Preschool Play and Learn, for example, has these cute apple themed ones that also teach one to one correspondence as you learn the numbers and count to 10.

Or use these tree-themed ones from Live Over Cs to form the numbers, count out items on a ten frame and place the correct number of items in the tree to match the number (do this with playdough, little buttons or whatever manipulatives you have on hand). Your little builders will also love these Duplo number mats from Life Over Cs, which allow you to shape the number out of blocks and count out the number of blocks that corresponds to each number.

I also love these mats from The Savvy Sparrow that include the number and the word you can trace with playdough or marker, showing how to count the number on your fingers, a tens frame and a number line.

Finger plays and counting songs are lots of fun for little ones, too, and Childhood 101 has a great collection of songs and rhymes having to do with numbers (as well as printable song cards you can use with them.

This cardboard roll number chain form Hands On As We Grow would be a fun addition to singing number songs or to use in other play and counting games. And we all love something easy to make with stuff we already have.

Older kids who already know the order of numbers can also use these connect the dot number printables from Fun Learning for Kids. Or use the shapes for playdough mats or to practice tracing even for kids who don’t know all the numbers in order yet.

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