Most kids get excited at the idea of going camping. After all, spending a night in a tent out in the woods sounds pretty adventurous! The trouble for parents and chaperones is that once you get kids out into the woods away from the PS3s, Facebook, and TV is that they might not know what to do with themselves! Thankfully, there are plenty of different games and ways you can make camping fun for kids. Here are a few such ideas:

Take Pictures!

Equip your kids each with a disposable camera and encourage them to take whatever snapshots from the camping excursion that they please. Kids like having their own camera to do with what they wish. Plus, the finished product is a bunch of pictures to give them fond memories of camping!

Scavenger Hunt

Nothing is quite as fun as a nature scavenger hunt. Send your kids out, with parental supervision, of course, on a nature scavenger hunt. Give them a specific leaf to find, a specific rock, have them find and take note of a number you’ve hidden in a certain place they’re given instructions to find, etc. You can keep kids busy for hours and having a blast with a good scavenger hunt!

Campfire Stories

One of the great joys of camping with kids is the chance to scare the crap out of them with a good campfire story at night. Tell your favorite campfire story, flashlight pointed at face, of course, and have them entranced for hours. If you don’t have a good campfire story, there are plenty classics available online that shouldn’t take too long to commit to memory.

Board Games

Bring a deck of cards and a couple of board games on your camping trip. You never know when your trip might get rained out or when there will be a moment of boredom where a deck of UNO will come in handy.

Have Them Help!

Camping is a great chance to teach kids the importance of responsibility and safety. Have your kids help you set up the tent and unload supplies. A great way to help your kids unload a little wild energy is to send them out on a mission to collect firewood. Have them gather as many twigs and sticks as they can. These will help keep the fire going later. You can also have your kids help prepare the food you’ll be eating at camp. Don’t forget supplies for s’mores. Graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate bars are a camping classic!

Star Gaze

Since most people live in urban settings these days, fewer and fewer kids truly know what a starry night sky looks like. Camping is a great chance to star gaze. Visit the site Earth Sky to learn a few interesting things to look for in tonight’s sky. Getting to see a constellation for the first time is a great memory for kids!

Camping can be a wonderfully rewarding, enjoyable, character-building activity for kids. It can also be one heck of a challenge! Taking children out into the woods away from their PlayStation and Wii while insisting they leave their handheld PSP behind already puts you in quite the hole in terms of helping them have a good time and keeping them entertained. Thankfully, as you and I both know, once they get out there and brighten up their attitude, they’ll see that camping can actually be quite fun!

Here are some ways to help make camping rewarding and enjoyable for your kids and their friends.

1. Build enthusiasm about the trip by including them as part of the planning. Take them to the grocery store so they can choose what snacks to bring and what games to play.

2. Make them have some modicum of responsibility during your camping excursion. Even if it’s something as simple as helping set up the tent or collect firewood. Give them some type of task that will help them feel like they’re a contributing hand in making the camping a success. Reassure them that there will be plenty of time for fun and games but that before you can do that, a little work must be done. This work-reward pattern is something many kids in this generation miss out on which is a shame because it’s very character building. You can make the camp chores fun by having awards for most sticks collected, fastest clean-up, etc.

3. Have an array of activities ready that your kids will enjoy. When I was a kid, my Dad brought out a bb-gun and had us shoot at empty cola cans from 30 feet away. I was only about 7 at the time and still remember how awesome it was to shoot a “real gun”! There are so many possible camping activities for kids and many of them are things they never get the chance to do in the city. Consider some of the following:

• Scavenger hunt (first kid to find all items on list wins)
• Rubbing souvenirs (place a leaf vien-side-up under a piece of paper, rub a crayon over the leaf)
• Frisbee, baseball, or football to toss around
• Camping races (one-legged race, sack race, backwards race with teams and partners)
• Alphabet nature hunt (have to find something that starts with each letter)
• Constellation and satellite search at night
• UNO, checkers or other picnic-table games
• Camping Olympics (organize a series of games with points awarded based on finish)
• Hide and seek (nature makes a great place to play hide and seek, just be sure to establish boundaries)

With any competitive event, be mindful of everyone and keep it fun for all. Winners should not be praised too much nor losers chastized. After all, it’s just camping!

4. Use your time out in nature to instill valuable skills with your kids. Teach them about fire safetey. Show them poisonous leaves so they know what to avoid.

5. When in doubt, have fun! I think you could agree that some of the best memories you form as a child take place while camping, so have a blast!

Who says games are for kids? Some of best times I’ve had while camping have been during a game of ladder golf and nobody would mistake me for a kid anymore!

Give the gift of fun to your friends and family who go camping by giving them a great camping game! Here’s my favorites:

Ladder Golf (also called blongo ball, hillbilly horseshoes, hillbilly golf, redneck golf, and a few other names that I can’t put in print). It’s my all time favorite camping game. It’s also a great game to play when tailgating. The game is played by throwing bolos (2 golf balls connected by a string of rope) at a three-rung ladder with different points values awarded depending on which rung (if any) the players hook their bolos on. The first person or team to 21 points wins.


Cornhole - It’s another tossing game where beanbags (traditionally ones filled with hard corn kernels hence the catchy name of Cornhole) are tossed at a hole on a board and points are scored for getting the bean bag through the hole, and also usually for getting the bag to land on the board. Yes, this list of my favorite camping games will be heavily weighted with tossing games but that’s because it’s not exactly a good idea to play a tossing game in your living room.

Washers - yep, it’s another tossing game but this time it’s large oversized washers that are thrown at a target. There’s a lot of different variations of the game but I like the version pictured here because the two boxes used in the game hook together and close up with enough room inside to store the washers which makes it a great game to take camping, tailgating, or for a day at the park.

Bocce Ball - It’s a lawn bowling game that originated in Italy. It’s meant to be played on a flat grassy surface but we’ve found it’s more fun and more challenging when the terrain is uneven, hilly, and has obstacles in the way like stones or trees. We can pretty much make any surface we have available to us at the campground work. If we went back to playing it on a flat grassy lawn we’d probably think it was boring.

Frisbee Golf - Our family plays it by choosing whatever targets are available to us whether it’s our camper, a picnic table, a tree, etc. Then whoever can get their frisbee disc to the target first wins that round.

It’s important to have some indoor games handy when camping as well because those rainy days will happen which means you and your family will want something to do besides stare out the camper window and wishing for the rain to stop.

Camp Board Game is a fun outdoor themed game for kids as well as adults. The goal is to get to camp first. Along the way players learn fun facts about the great outdoors.

If you want to give a more traditional board game with an outdoor twist, how about the Planet Earth version of Monopoly? Instead of buying properties players buy, sell and trade the earth’s more beautiful environments and mysterious creatures.

So don’t delay. Gift the gift of fun today!