7 Fun Summer Activities for Preschoolers {Make Memories that last}

Good old summertime! Time to get outside and have a little fun with these 7 easy summer activities for preschoolers. These crafts & activities will keep them busy and make great memories for you and for them!

Summer Activities for Preschoolers

I have great memories of summertime growing up. Much was spent in the backyard with my cousins playing in the mud. My aunt was also the queen of crafts and activities and always had something fun and new for us to try.

Now I’m onto making memories with my own girls. I hope you and your kids enjoy these 7 fun summer activities!

Water Fun

The first and most obvious way to have fun in the summertime is with water! There are so many different ways to play and most are great for younger kids too. Some ideas include:

For water balloons just test them with your kids first. Some kids may not like a balloon popping on them. But you can still throw them at a wall (you can even make targets) or on the sidewalk.

The water table is pretty much our go to. I like that they can play without getting soaked if I’m not feeling up to a full scale clean up job. You can also add water beads and scoops or bubbles for an extra level of fun!

Water beads can be a choking hazard so always supervise play and dispose of them properly when you’re done.

Water tables can sell out fast so you may have to hunt around or buy online. You can also check your local Buy Nothing group or a resale page for local moms.

Snow Cones

Making snow cones is one of my favorite summer memories. We’d go to my aunt’s house and she’d have it all set up. We’d take turns helping to shave the ice and then add some flavoring.

Half the fun was that we got to make it ourselves. It was the perfect way to cool down on a hot summer day.

If you don’t want to use the flavoring you can always use a little bit of juice instead.

Chalk Art

Chalk is an easy outdoor activity…and I love the easy clean-up. Little artists can color on a giant outdoor canvas and then you simply wash and repeat the next day.

You can also create fun games, practice drawing shapes or letters, the ideas are really only limited by your imaginations.

For an extra level of fun you can try make your own homemade chalk or sidewalk foam. Kids will love playing with something they made themselves.

Tie-Dye

Tie-Dye seems to be making a come back. This was another of our summer favorites growing up. Check out this guide to tie-dying with kids.

She suggests using a bathtub or sink but if you’re doing it outdoors you could do it on the lawn or in a kiddie pool with the rack like she suggests to keep your items from sitting in a pool of dye.

Don’t feel like all the set up for tie-dying? You can always buy a pair of white shoes and let them paint or color them. You may want to grab some fabric pens as regular markers will wash out the first time the shoes hit the washing machine.

How cool is it to wear something you designed yourself?!

How to set up an outdoor space for kids

Let’s pause for a minute and discuss outdoor spaces. We lived at our place for over 6 years before the quarantine of 2020 made us get creative and actually take the time to make a nice outdoor space for our girls.

Hauling our water table in and out of storage almost every day and greasing down two kids with sunscreen doesn’t make outdoor water play much fun for the adults. We finally set up a canopy, that my 3-year-old calls a tent, and put our pool and water table under it.

It keeps it a bit cool and we don’t need sunscreen every day unless they decide to venture out into the chalk area for a long period of time.

We managed to score a slide for free through a local Facebook Buy Nothing group. A few chairs completed our outdoor area and now we love spending time playing in our small yard area.

If you do need some sunscreen our favorite is Think Baby!

Grab our Outdoor Scavenger hunt printable to make exploring your new space into a fun game.

Now back to our summer activity list.

Squirt Gun Painting

I’ve seen this one on Pinterest and Facebook for a while. Preschool age is a great time to try this so long as your child is coordinated enough and strong enough to squeeze a squirt gun or squirt bottle.

Fill the squirt gun or bottle with liquid water colors and hang a large sheet of paper for them to use as their canvas. Check out this guide to squirt gun painting.

Don’t want to use colors? You can always do water painting instead. Simply fill them with water, or use water and a paintbrush. Then you can paint the ground, a piece of paper, a fence, anything really since it will just dry up in the sun.

Homemade Ice cream

Another summer favorite at family gatherings was making homemade ice cream. We always used a manual crank type and everyone would take a turn churning the ice cream.

The youngest would go first when it was easy to turn and my grandfather would always finish it off when it was too hard for the rest of us to turn anymore.

We’d top it with fresh summer fruit or sprinkles for a fun treat.

Nowadays you can easily grab an electric ice cream machine which will do the work for you once you add all the ingredients.

Want to make just a single serving? You can also make ice cream in a bag which kids will love. Check out this Facebook video and follow our page while you’re there.

Raise some bugs

If your kids are like mine they love checking out all the bugs that live outside. For my preschooler, it’s ants.

A fun project is to let them raise some bugs of their own. You can do either Butterflies or Ladybugs. You buy the enclosure and they usually come with a certificate to get the larvae you’ll need. You feed and care for them until they turn into Butterflies or Ladybugs and then release them into the wild.

Kids will love watching every step of the bug’s development!

You can also do an ant farm but as you don’t generally get a queen ant your ants will only live a short time as they cannot survive without a queen. That’s why I prefer the other sets.

I hope you and your kids enjoy making summer memories with these fun ideas. You can also add them to your summer bucket list printable.

Follow us on Facebook where I’ll be sharing fun ideas all summer long.

summer activities for preschoolers

Thanks for sharing!

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