Name: ICHE Homeschool Conference
Start: 2025-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-06-07T23:59:59-05:00
Location: Bourbonnais, IL

Tagged: Family Activities, family time, free-time, small houses

This topic has 28 replies, 15 voices, and was last updated 10 years, 7 months ago by LindseyD.

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September 16, 2014 at 11:24 pm
LindseyD
Participant
Since moving 2 months ago, our family has had a difficult time getting back to our family time routine. Dh gets home between 4:30-5:00 p.m., we typically eat dinner by 6:00, and then we have about 2.5 hours of open time. I have had “theme” nights in the past (Monday: game night; Thursday: life group; Friday: movie night, etc.). We are just kind of bored with our nights.
We still have pizza and family movie every Friday. Maybe one evening per week we go out for ice cream, but not regularly enough for it to be part of our routine. We live in an area with a pool, and my husband likes to take the kids swimming a couple of evenings a week, but I can’t swim in chlorine (thyroid issues) and with fall coming, the pool evenings are about to end. I’m still up for a game night once a week too.
Really, I need 4-5 suggestions of other fun evening things we can do during our 2.5 hours of open time. We are not interested in attending church in the evenings. We live in an apartment, so dh and ds don’t have a way to get out the tools and build stuff together. This also makes going outside difficult since we don’t have a yard. There are several nice parks around, and we have done that quite a bit, but I don’t know that we need a scheduled weekly park night, ya know?
The kids have between 2-4 hours of free play time in the afternoons, so I really want suggestions to be things we can all do and ENJOY together. I would not enjoy playing Legos for 2.5 hours one night a week. My dh is not interested in family coloring time. Do you get what I’m saying?
Thank you in advance for any creative ideas you can give me. My creative juices are NOT flowing!
Lindsey
September 16, 2014 at 11:30 pm
Karen
Participant
Hmmmm. How about some new hobbies? Maybe the girls learn knitting or crochetting or scrapbooking or quilting or…. and the boys learn to whittle wood or put together model planes or model anythings.
Or you can have a read aloud?
Or you can invite friends over?
Or you can go to a nursing home to visit strangers (or people you know)?
Or you can read for 2.5 hours and drink tea (or hot chocolate)? (That sounds like heaven to me!!)
September 16, 2014 at 11:38 pm
LindseyD
Participant
Karen,
Those are GREAT suggestions! (And they seem so obvious!). We do read aloud sometimes before bed, but not for 2.5 hours. I think our voices would be gone! I love your idea of learning a new hobby together. We love to invite friends over, but it’s difficult to schedule it to one night per week with all of our friends having different (and sometimes very busy) schedules. We just aren’t busy people. Now is when I’m wishing we had some sort of sport or extracurricular to do one evening per week so I didn’t have to worry about that evening!
September 17, 2014 at 1:21 am
Angelina
Participant
Before we moved to our current location (country roads and hills and not bike friendly), we had a wonderful routine of going for a family bike ride every night after dinner. It usually took up about an hour and it was wonderful! Sometimes we had a destination…i.e. pop in to see a friend, make a little stop at a park, or visit the shop windows on main street…other times it was just a bike ride. I really miss this since we’ve moved as we’re on a road/area now that is not bike friendly. Hopefully you are in an area where this might work.
Love the game night idea – keep that one up!
I am just so in AWE of the fact that you have 2.5 hours to plan for! That is a really BIG chunk of time. I couldn’t imagine my dinner and clean up and everything being completely done by 6pm – that is so wonderful, Lindsey! If I were in your situation I would definitely slot my weekly nature walk for one of the nights. Daddy would get a chance to be involved in something on the homeschooling front and you’d free up your usual time slot where you have nature walk for something else.
On that note – what else is DH intersted in? Is DH interested in art at all? Why not do picture study at this time? My DH is often amazed at the kind of work we do in our homeschool. He has NEVER studied artists or poetry in any great detail. Often, when we tell him about what we’ve studied/learned/talked about, he is really intrigued and wishing HE could come to our homeschool and learn it with us! Maybe your 2.5 hours of free time – instead of thinking of it as FAMILY time – you could think of it in terms of homeschool areas where DH could get involved?
Blessings, Angie

September 17, 2014 at 2:51 am
ServingwithJoy
Participant
Hi Lindsay –
You have been given some great suggestions. I especially love the idea of doing a nature walk in the evening – I have never considered that and what a great way to end the day!
We have done family devotions with Dad in the evenings right before bed and that works well.
When I was a kid we worked on a puzzle together in the evenings – it sounds lame but it was really a great bonding experience :-).
I know your hubs is musical – could you have some singing/instrument practice in the evening? Or just worship times?
Riding bikes? Show and tell? Bake something or cook something to enjoy or share?
Games are always a hit around here. Chess, Uno, Skipbo and Scrabble are our go-to games. We have also enjoyed the games like Story Cubes where everyone contributes to build a story. I hear there is a fun timeline game out as well.
And maybe one of those evenings you could get a sitter or tuck the kids in early for a little quiet time for you and your hubby to reconnect?
September 17, 2014 at 3:29 am
sheraz
Participant
We listen to literature audio books and do puzzles one night a week. This is fun because Audible has great books that even my dh enjoys…we just finished the Narnia series last year and are starting the Little Britches series this year.
We have several girls who like drama activities, so I got some reader’s theater books to try. They like to make puppets from stories they read and tell us the story as well. Maybe a Shakespeare evening?
Try games like Clue, Scattergories, or Apples to Apples (there are fun junior versions). My kids really like them.
We also plan one night a week for PE night and we all play games like kickball, volleyball, etc. We may not be good or have a full team, but we run around and laugh. 😉
September 17, 2014 at 3:59 am
jmac17
Participant
Ok, so now I need to figure out how to have more time in the evenings to be able to use all these great ideas!
My only additional idea is to set up a service oriented night. Make cookies for a neighbour, clean up the nearest park, shovel snow, make a bunch of freezer meals to have on hand for people in need, have everyone knit/crochet/loom squares and join them together to make a blanket to give away, write letters (or draw pictures) to send to relatives or friends.
September 17, 2014 at 12:31 pm
Kayla
Participant
My kids are younger than yours but here are things we like to do I the evenings:
Family grocery shopping
Nature walks
Puzzels
Dates with the kids
I can’t wait for the kids to be older for games other than candy land and chutes and ladders. I love Ticket to Ride,
But my kids are still too young for it.
Sometimes we just go for a drive and go watch a sun set.
Dance party!
I’m drawing a blank right now. But having friends over is nice. And if you just invite them over for coffee and dessert it is cheaper than dinner
September 17, 2014 at 2:56 pm
LindseyD
Participant
Games we play regularly are Clue, SkipBo, Chicken Foot (dominoes), Bananagrams, and Monopoly. I’ll check out some of the ones you all have suggested!
We tried a puzzle…and dd9 lost interest after about 15 minutes. It was a very difficult puzzle though, and we gave up on it after having it on the table for over a week and not making much progress. Maybe we should get a simpler one first!
I LOVE the nature walk idea! Our best nature walks happen at the park.
I also LOVE the idea of doing a service-oriented project as a family. I think I’ll call some nursing homes and find out if they have something for us to do one night per week.
Dh’s interests (other than computers) are a mystery. He plays guitar and loves to program. Outside of that, he doesn’t have hobbies really. He is the most easy-going person you’ve ever met in your life, so he’s usually “along for the ride”. In the past, he used some evenings to get stuff done around the house, like mowing the yard, fixing stuff, or working in the garage. Now that we live in an apartment, he doesn’t have to do any of that anymore. I know living here is going to be a short season for us, so we are trying to enjoy this strange life of having no maintenance responsibilities on a home!
We do have family worship times, usually on Saturday or Sunday evenings. And we have had one home church meeting with other families, but we hope to increase our meetings to bi-monthly at the very least.
These suggestions have been so very helpful! I can’t wait for dh to come home today so we can figure out what to do next!
Blessings,
Lindsey
September 17, 2014 at 3:26 pm
cdm2kk
Participant
Family story time with a twist…… Instead of reading a book, tell a story. You and your husband can take turns and even the kids can join in if they are able to.
Here is the kicker… the stories you tell are YOUR family’s history. So tell about a great memory from your school days OR tell how you enjoyed your summers as a kid OR tell how you and your husabnd met OR tell how you learned to drive OR about when you got your first car OR about what child 1’s birth was like OR first week as being a Mom OR ….. the list goes on and on…. we tend to share these little tid bits to new people we meet in casual convo, but rarely do we share them with our own family members….sometimes at family reunions etc, but what a lovely way for your kids to get to know their aunts and uncles and other family members through stories of your personal experiences. This could also begin a love of geneology in your kids if they can see their family tree as real people and not just names.
I over heard my Mom tell stories to other adults, but never really to me or my sister and rarely about herself or my dad. We ususally only heard a few when we were going there for the holidays etc. My inlaws however are always referencing stories from their past and I feel I know them and their siblings ten times more than my own. HTH
September 17, 2014 at 4:15 pm
LindseyD
Participant
cdm2kk,
Family stories tend to be our dinner time conversation. Our kids absolutely LOVE it when we tell them about our childhoods. I bet my dh has told the story of getting a 3-pronged fish hook stuck in his head 50 times!
Unfortunately, I don’t know anything about my biological father’s side of the family, and I don’t know anything about my mother’s side past my grandmother. (My mother had a terrible childhood, so she doesn’t have many good memories either.) Dh has a little more knowledge of his family’s history, but not much. So we stick to our own childhoods, marriage, births, and the times our children don’t remember because they were so little.
Thanks for the suggestion! I’m glad we have our evenings at the dinner table to share these wonderful stories.
September 17, 2014 at 4:38 pm
cdm2kk
Participant
I feel for you on the geneology issues….I don’t know much on my side of the family either and all attempts to get info has not been well received. My husband’s side however is crazy. His mother had 18 siblings!! So he has lots of aunts and uncles and cousins, but we mainly talk about our personal childhoods and the kid’s when they were too little to remember too.
I just know some families that never do this so I thought I would mention. 😉

September 17, 2014 at 5:13 pm
sheraz
Participant
You can easily set up accounts from places like familysearch.org or ancestry.com to help you find your relatives. It’s pretty cool to find out where you come from and how you got where you are, so to speak. 😉 There are other places as well, they’re just not coming to mind right now.
We do simple puzzles, or we would lose our kids. lol
One thing that is usually very much needed and appreciated in a nursing home in the evenings is a group to wash wheelchairs while residents are in bed. Mending clothing is also desperately needed. Of course, adopting a resident without family is HUGE.
September 17, 2014 at 8:29 pm
Misty
Participant
I can’t wait to read all the responses so if this is mentioned let me know: (this is our plans) movie night, 1-on-1 night (parents take one kid for 30-60 minutes alone with mom and dad, other kids have quiet time on their beds), read aloud night, game night, free play night (kids do what they want and parents join in), blanket night (kids all get a spot a.k.a blanket and find something quiet to do while dh and I get to just chat and they are NOT allowed to interupt, obviously listening is aloud , this is again an hour to hour and a half).
MN winters make for long dark nights that start to early in the evening, if we’re not careful we could be eating dinner at 3 just to try and do it before it’s dark. So we also plan our nights because getting outside is not an option every night. These things help us to focus on the kids and us.
I think a service idea would be good. I would love to do Feed My Starving Children every other month. It’s just over an hour away so scheduling it would be a must. Can’t wait to come back and read the responses when I have more time!
September 17, 2014 at 10:21 pm
beloved
Participant
You could have a standing Skype appointment with a long distance friend or relative.