Spring Health and Wellness Activities for Kids and Families
Looking for some fun activities for your family to try out this Spring? Here I’m sharing my favorite health and wellness activities for kids and families to get you started!
This post is sponsored by Babbleboxx, but all opinions are my own.
Everyone knows that springtime means getting some fun in the sun – when it’s not raining, of course. There’s Easter to celebrate, new flowers to bloom, and (hopefully) the weather’s nice enough for you and your family to get out and enjoy a healthy dose of some vitamin D.
My family loves to start the season of Spring by being healthy together. We try new healthy foods, spend time together under the sun playing games, and practice new activities together. As a mom, I always try to include everyone and take an active role in supporting health and wellness for my kids and family.
This includes making new – yet still fun – activities for my littles.
If you want to support parental engagement within your family and want to encourage health and wellness for your kids, check out my ideas below so you can plan ahead for Spring!
Fun Health and Wellness Activities for Kids and Families
1. Action for Healthy Kids’ Every Kid Healthy Week
Action for Healthy Kids (AFHK) is a nonprofit organization that supports bringing educators and families together so they can both foster healthier schools and communities that can provide physical and emotional health resources for kids. AFHK understands that healthy habits start at home and delivers tools, opportunities, and support for underserved communities; after all, everyone deserves to be healthy in body and mind, no matter what their circumstances are or how their home life looks.
Their goal is to help you model healthy behavior with nutrition, physical activity, and emotional wellness. One of their recommendations is to celebrate Every Kid Healthy Week and follow along with the activities they’ve planned for each weekday (click to learn more about each one):
- Mindful Monday – exploring play-based yoga
- Tasty Tuesday – host a family taste test
- Wellness Wednesday – create a family self-care plan
- Thoughtful Thursday – feeling through colors
- Fitness Friday – fun and games with household items
I definitely would encourage signing up to participate here and enjoy the week of fun from April 26-30, but you don’t have to wait until then to do these activities! Feel free to also develop your own activities that are tailored to what your family will enjoy most.
Check out some of our kid-friendly exercise ideas here!
2. Get Outside and Play
You know what’s always going to be important, no matter what? Outside time in the sun!
Breathing in the fresh air, being around nature, and absorbing that vitamin D is always a wonderful idea. It just feels GOOD.
My family has found that it can be easy to get busy and forget to make time to just play together, but we’ve found a way around that. We schedule 30 minutes a day to drop our phones, go outside, and find a fun game to play.
My younger ones’ favorite game is to play with the Glove-A-Bubbles from Zuru. The glove has holes in it so that when they dip it in bubble soap and wave it in the air, lots of bubbles come flying out. It’s great for developing my preschoolers’ motor skills, and watching them chase all the bubbles is just tons of fun!
I’ve even found a way to get a little arm workout for myself by supplying the littlest Seghetti with an endless stream of bubbles. 😉 Multitasking for the win!
It’s also 100% recyclable through Zuru’s partnership with TerraCycle – which we LOVE – so you don’t have to worry about not being earth-conscious while you’re having fun.
Plus, who doesn’t love bubbles? Who wouldn’t enjoy an easy and speedy way to start some outdoor fun?
If you’re looking for awesome non-candy Easter basket stuffers for your kids, the Glove-A-Bubbles are perfect!
You can find the Glove-A-Bubbles at Target online here!
3. Encourage Imaginative Play
Playing pretend with your kids has a LOT of benefits:
- It encourages language development and helps them learn how to better express what they’re trying to say.
- It can help increase social skills while they talk to their imaginary friends or toys.
- It can help develop critical thinking, problem solving behavior, thinking outside of the box, and overall encourages them to use both the practical and imaginative parts of their brain.
- It overall encourages creativity and learning how to use their imagination and think abstractly.
My littles love to play dress up: Aren loves being a pretty princess while Rowen loves his superhero pajamas. They’ll interact with their stuffies and play pretend with them, be it a tea party or a pizza restaurant. What they love the most, though, are their Rainbocorns from ZURU.
Rainbocorns Sparkle Heart Surprise 2 from ZURU are a series of collectible plushies that come in a bright mystery egg. They’re covered in bright colors, rainbows, and sparkles – basically, they’re any kid’s dream plushie and make for glamorous imaginary friends.
There are currently six new Rainbocorns, and they all come with a new stamp surprise.
Aren loves playing dress up with them, having them help with cooking and baking in her pretend kitchenette, and they help make bedtime that much sweeter.
I decided I would put a new Rainbocorn in Aren’s Easter basket as an alternative to candy or chocolate. Now, that’s not to say there won’t be any treats this Easter, but we are definitely focusing more on surprises like these that encourage curiosity and imagination.
Plus, a Rainbocorn will last much longer than any candy or chocolate this Easter. And at just $9.99, they can have so many surprises at an affordable price! Check them out here at Target.
4. Family Reading and Learning
If there’s one thing my kids and I both love to do, it’s read a fun book. My kids are constantly flipping through their favorite books, reading to themselves or reading to me, or trying to get me to read it for them. You can introduce this into your routine (if you haven’t already) by:
- Modeling how to read with your kids
- Visiting the library so they can keep reading new books without having to buy a lot more
- Exploring books with healthy and mindful themes like self-care and environment books
Our favorite book at the moment is “A Child’s Introduction to the Environment“. It’s a fun and very informative guide to Earth and the water, land, and air that’s around us.
Although it’s geared more towards the 8-12 age range, my younger children still enjoy looking at the pictures and pretending they can read what each page says. Kaiden, my 11 year-old, enjoyed reading it because it discusses climate change and has a lot of interactive elements – it’s a book that inspires thoughtfulness and is very engaging while covering a very serious topic.
There are also more stories in the bestselling and award-winning Child’s Introduction Series, so I’m sure you’ll quickly find a family favorite (or a few!).
Here are a few more ideas for kids to beat the boredom this summer!
5. Go for a Family Walk
Get out there and get some family time in while enjoying the good weather! You can do a walk around the neighborhood, walk on a nearby trail, or even just explore a new place you’ve never been to – maybe a downtown area you’ve yet to explore.
I will give one piece of advice, though: make sure you wear great shoes and socks! I personally wear some supportive tennis shoes as well as my No nonsense socks. I like these the most, however, because of the kids socks they provide.
No nonsense’s ExpanTech socks for kids have vertical and horizontal stretch capabilities, so the sock expands as your child grows. In other words, as your kid grows shoe sizes, the socks grow with them across multiple sizes, meaning there’s less socks you have to buy as they get older.
They also come in a pack of 6 pairs, so you have plenty of socks for them and won’t have to continuously buy more.
Another fun no-candy Easter idea: Stuff plastic Easter eggs with new pairs of socks!
6. Make Mealtime a Part of Family Fun
If you know me, you know I try my best to provide nutritious foods for my kids. I like to encourage them to try new foods, but kids can be really picky. These days, they’re obsessed with eating their food from pouches.
This is where Freeli Foods comes in.
I took their preference for pouches to my advantage and started buying Heat & Eat Meals from Freeli Foods. These pouches keep mealtimes easy as they provide a quick option on hand without compromising on nutrition.
They’re not a puree, but they are a refrigerated heat and eat meal in the convenience of a pouch. Their flavors consist of mac & cheese, pasta & meat sauce, chicken noodle, burrito bowl, and chicken teriyaki.
Ready in just 45 seconds, these can be eaten straight from the pouch or in a bowl. Perfect when you just don’t have the time (or energy) to cook a full meal!
Freeli Foods is available online at Fresh Thyme or in Kroger stores. They also are high in protein, have no added sugars, no artificial colors or preservatives, and are the perfect on-the-go meal for school lunches or family outings.
Plus, Freeli Foods currently has a discount code that is good for 10% off a single box of Freeli. Use my discount code babble10 to save (valid through 4/15/21)!
