What's on at Easter - Budget Activities

The school holidays can really affect your budgetting and saving.  They certainly do mine.  I get sick of hearing my own voice say No to everything that costs money.

Here's five ways to get you and the kids out of the house for not very many pennies at all.

1.  Take a picnic.  Wherever you go, whatever you do, take food with you.  I can't pay £2 for a sandwich and drinks really affect the savings.  Take far too many drinks and enough food to keep the "can I haves?" at bay.

Cheap Days out for kids

2.  Visit a Museum.  The majority are free.  Google your county followed by the word museum and find one you may not have known about.  Fleetwood Museum was our surprise last Easter.

3.  Visit a Graveyard.  What?!!  Are you crazy!? What kind of day out is that?  Well, if you've an interest in family history or maybe a section in your local graveyard (we have a polish section and a WW2 section) you can really get stuck into discussions about how the world was.  ok, it's not an every holiday day out, but it is an experience!

4. Park Crawl.  Like a pub crawl but parks instead.  Great if you've got fuel in the car and your town has several parks.  We visited one a week in the summer hols last year and rated them on equipment and friendliness of locals.

5. Couponing!!  I know Walkers are currently giving half price vouchers to Sea Life Centres and if you get on the money saving forums, any good deals will be listed.  There's always Tesco vouchers too.  You can even buy them for a song on ebay! Search Tickets and see what comes up.

6.  RNLI - if you live on the coast, have a mosey round the lifeboat station.  Check they are open first though, most are and all have an open day at some point in the year.

7.  Scavenger Hunt.  You know I love them.  Do a nature themed sheet and do the hunt in the park before you settle down for your picnic.  Take a bat and ball and go all old school in the afternoon with ball games!

So, hopefully that'll give you some ideas to get out.  And if you had budgetted for the day out and do a cheaper, or free alternative, bank the money in your savings fund!

How to do a Scavenger Hunt

All kids seem to want to do nowadays is play on a console or talk on facetime.  I find it frustrating and they get ratty when they just sit staring at the screen so I regularly set up activities which don't involve any screen time.

As you know, I like to do a physical activity after school and this is one of my favorites - a scavenger hunt.  Can be done inside on a rainy day or outside.

Get Outside and Scavenge!

You will Need:

This Printout

A Bag for each child

A pencil

How To:

On the printout there is a completed sheet (which is items in our home to give you an idea) and there is a blank sheet.

If you are using the blank sheet, fill in with items in your home, garden or popular nature items you'll find at your hunt site.  I like to add items of interest such as an old photo or strange holiday trinket, something that will get a conversation and learning discussion started.

Make sure all the items can be found, I usually move a few from their usual places to a hiding place (I like to try to outsmart the kids!!).  Outside hunts are great because you never know what they'll come back with!

The kids can either take the items and put them in their bag or just write down where the item is, up to you.

The winner is the person with the most items or the person to finish first.  In the event of just one child doing the hunt, I give the prize for more than 75% of the list.  

I reward the winner with the choice of a Golden Time activity.  It's something we can all do together and a treat with is decided by the winner.  Unfortunately they do sometimes choose 30 minutes on the xbox which kind of defeats my no screen time activity, but hey, they worked for it.

A great way to reduce screen time, get the kids on their feet and pass an hour. (and chance to grab a quiet coffee for you!!)

Happy Hunting!