In Seattle, people have the necessary equipment, boots, and clothing of all sizes. They have built a relationship with the weather through years of experience. In LA, we have around thirty-five rainy days a year and most of them are concentrated in the January-to-March period. Every single rainy day is completely unexpected. Stroller cover is somewhere in the garage. The boots your little one wore last winter do not fit anymore. All the operating systems that work perfectly fine in sunny weather break suddenly.
A preschooler does not care that it is unusual. They only care that they have been inside since morning and that something needs to happen.
This is a list of indoor activities prepared for rainy days in Los Angeles - sudden, sometimes even multi-day, and faced by parents who never expected them.
Indoor Preschool Activities for Rainy Days That Require Zero Preparation
It is possible to spend the first hour in anticipation of something novel, but the difficulty will start soon and you should use it for the activities that require no preparation at all.
Cushion mountains. Take all the cushions that you can find in the house and put them on the floor for your preschooler to jump onto them. This is the most effective activity among all the indoor preschool activities for rainy days, but it costs you nothing except twenty minutes of work to rearrange everything.
Masking tape roads on the floor. Take some masking tape and spend fifteen minutes laying out some kind of route. A preschooler can play with cars in it. You will find out that this tape will easily peel off the flooring.
Balloon volleyball - the only rule is that the balloon cannot touch the ground. It is slow enough for a three-year-old to follow it, but it will help them expend their energy.
Indoor obstacle course from the furniture. Go under the table, over the cushion, round the chair, and jump onto the pillow. Build a completely different course an hour later and it will still be an indoor preschool activity for rainy days.
Taking a bath in the afternoon. Taking a bath at two o'clock in the afternoon seems like an evil plan, but it is a very effective one indeed. Just add to it some cups, a whisk, and food colouring and you will have forty extra minutes of fun.
Blanket fort under the dining table. This classic activity will work simply because it provides a child with its own private space in the house where he/she had been staying all day. Add a flashlight and some snacks and they may not want to leave the fort.
Indoor Rainy Day Activities for Preschoolers That Use up Energy
Every parent knows the truth that is ignored by many people creating craft lists: the crafts cannot solve the problem. A preschooler that does not move his/her body will not be relaxed by drawing or making crafts - they will just make him/her nervous.
Indoor rainy day activities for preschoolers must be physical or the situation will only become worse.
Animal walks down the hallway. Bear crawling one way, crab walking back, frogs, and snakes.
These are ridiculous, but truly tiring.
Dance party in the dark. Turn off the lights and turn on the flashlight of your phone to dance to five songs. It will take fifteen minutes of cardio exercises for children.
Sock skating. It is free and causes a very special kind of laughing.
Hallway bowling using empty plastic bottles and a ball. Setting up, knocking down and resetting - the latter takes up half of the activity.
Jumping games. Anything with jumping. How many jumps are necessary to cross the hall, how many jumps over the tape, frog jumping to the kitchen. Jumping is the most effective way to use energy indoors.
The limitation of most of these activities is the small LA apartment. Many of them require much space and a downstairs neighbor who is not home. If the flat is small and the rain lasts for several days, indoor preschool activities literally run out of options.
Preschool Indoor Games for Rainy Days with Several Children
When the group dynamics is taken into account, the calculations are changed completely. Preschool indoor games for rainy days for two or more children require extremely simple rules and stakes that are interesting enough for the eldest member of the group.
Freeze dance. Simple rules, understood immediately - for ages from two to ten.
Hot and cold. One child hides an object and another one searches for it. The five-year-old likes to hide the object and three-year-old prefers to find it.
Simon says. It teaches listening while looking like a game and older children love to lead it.
Treasure hunt with the picture clues for pre-readers. Making the clues is an activity in itself and one rainy day will give you two activities.
Sticky spider web - masking tape laid out across the door, sticky side out, and throwing balls of paper at it. Setup will take five minutes, game thirty and novelty is quite high.
Group rules for all of these activities: turns under thirty seconds, rules stated in one sentence and an adult to restart the game when it collapses.
Rainy Day Indoor Activities for Preschoolers That Teach Something
Not every rainy hour must be used to discharge the energy. It is possible to combine learning and playing in rainy day indoor activities for preschoolers without turning them into lessons.
Watching the rain. Simply sitting at the window and counting the drops that run down the glass, choosing two of them and racing them, asking questions about the direction of the rain. A child will watch it much longer than you can imagine.
Puddle science. As soon as the rain stops - it usually happens in a few hours in LA. Measuring a puddle using a stick, measuring it again after an hour, watching it drying. It is evaporation without the term.
Baking soda and vinegar experiment. It has no connection to the rain but absorbs the attention of a four-year-old for a long time.
Sorting and matching games using everything that is in the drawer. Buttons, pasta shapes, bottle caps. Preschoolers actually like sorting and it is a quiet activity.
Reading, but correctly - with voices, pauses for discussions, page turning. A rainy day is the perfect time to read.
When the Home Options Run out - What LA Families Actually Do
Now let us be realistic about the limitation of the previous suggestions. They will work for the first rainy day, but not for the second one. And definitely not for the third day when the Pacific storm system settles in Southern California for an entire week. A family in the LA apartment with a four-year-old child has a problem - and no backyard.
Our indoor floor is created to solve precisely this problem and rainy weeks show it best. Our Santa Monica space 828 Pico Blvd and our Los Angeles space 10672 West Pico Blvd become full fast during rainy days - it is the most predictable pattern in our calendar. The parents arrive somewhat crazy from the kids that spent eighteen hours in the apartment.
The useful part is what happens next. Multi-level climbing structures, zoning by difficulty levels, soft surfaces everywhere, and two hours when a preschooler can climb, run, slide and shout in order to exhaust himself. Meanwhile the parents can sit and rest - there is real furniture to sit on with a good view of the whole floor. There are no benches near the door.
Walk-in Open Play takes place at 10 AM (Monday-Friday) and at 9 AM (Sundays) without any reservations. It is important in rainy days because nobody plans a rainy day in advance. For the first child it will cost $35 for two hours, for the second - $25, for the third - $20. Two adults per family are also included. $200 monthly membership is what families buy in January and February when the rain comes in bunches and one visit leads to six.
A practical piece of advice from LA: rainy days are our busiest times, so arriving close to the opening will guarantee you a calmer floor than arrival at 2 PM when every parent from Santa Monica has had the same idea.
What Not To Do on the Third Rainy Day
There are two common mistakes, both extremely easy to make.
The first one is using screens as a default and not a choice. There is nothing wrong with a film in a rainy afternoon. However, it becomes problematic when it runs from 10 AM till dinner because a child who has been sitting and stimulated for six hours is much harder to calm at bedtime than a bored one.
The second mistake is to become a cruise director of the day. Trying to schedule six activities in one rainy day exhausts a parent in the first half of it and he or she has nothing left for the hardest hour at 4 PM. Two activities and boredom are much better strategy. A bored child invents something to do and usually it is much better than what you could organize.
And the third mistake, because we are being honest, is not taking a kid outdoors. The rain in Los Angeles is warm and twenty minutes of a walk in it, wearing any coat and splashing in puddles will change the whole day. Treating rainy day as an order to stay at home is purely cultural, not meteorological.
