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.

Growing Up Ladybug and How to Become a Butterfly are both by Stepanka Sekaninova and illustrated by Linh Dao, and they came out at the same time and are on similar themes, so let’s look at them together.

Growing Up Ladybug is narrated by Mariella, a seven-spot ladybug. She talks about the parts of a ladybug, where they live, different kinds of ladybugs, why humans love them, their defenses against predators and the life cycle of a ladybug.

The drawings are cute if not always scientifically accurate, it’s not in such a way that’s likely to confuse kids (who probably already know that ladybug mamas don’t push their larval babies around in strollers, for instance.

It’s a good general description of the life cycle of a lady bug and why we like having them around.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Similarly, How to Become a Butterfly covers the life cycle of a butterfly, starting with caterpillars eating burning nettle leaves. (Here Amanda is the narrator.) The book talks about a few of the more than 18,000 daytime butterflies in the world as well as other creatures that live in the meadow (there’s that ladybug again, along with crickets, bees and other bugs).

It also covers some of the enemies of caterpillars like wasps and spiders, and the defenses that caterpillars use to try to prevent being eaten. It illustrates how caterpillars grow and change as they molt and prepare to pupate, and what a caterpillar looks like before and while it is forming its chrysalis. And while the book uses the word metamorphasis it doesn’t really talk about what happens between the caterpillar forming a chrysalis and the butterfly hatching.

This butterfly is a peacock butterfly, and once it hatches the book covers the parts of a butterfly and the life cycle. It also talks about nocturnal moths (though it says nocturnal butterflies are “usually called moths” when moths are actually a different species) and what butterflies do at night.

I’m maybe a little hard on this book because my daughter is a butterfly expert from way back, but it is still cute and good for the very basic basics of the butterfly life cycle.

Both books would be fun additions to your bookshelf for younger kids starting to learn about different animals or who have an interest in insects.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Have you read?

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