22 Activities for Grandparents and Grandkids

Pull out the recipe that lives on one stained index card, in your mother's handwriting, with a butter thumbprint in the corner. Then give each grandchild a real job.

A 3-year-old can dump and stir. A 7-year-old can level flour with the back of a knife. A 12-year-old can read the card aloud and double the batch. You keep the oven.

For the youngest, borrow a trick from USDA's MyPlate program, whose "Look and Cook" cards show each recipe step as a picture a child can follow beside an adult. Sketch yours the same way: a bowl, three eggs, a spoon going round.

Slide the card into a plastic sleeve before the next batch gets anywhere near it.

A deck of cards rides in your purse, so it goes wherever the visit does: a diner booth while the pancakes take forever, a waiting room, a picnic blanket.

Go Fish is the starter. Players ask each other for a rank ("Got any 7s?") and draw when told to go fish. The goal, in Bicycle's official rules, is books: all four cards of one rank.

UNO is the step up. The official instructions cover 2 to 10 players, enough for a holiday table. Settle house rules out loud before anyone deals, especially for wild and draw cards.

A puzzle waits for you. Set it on a card table in the den and it fills the gaps of a visit: ten minutes before breakfast, twenty while the casserole bakes.

The catch is the pieces, which can be hard to see and harder to pick up with stiff fingers. Ravensburger's Large Format puzzles use oversized pieces for easier handling and visibility, in 300-piece sets.

Give the grandchild the edge pieces and a baking sheet to sort them on. Keep the sky for yourself. Let the grandchild be the one who sets the last piece in place before the puzzle goes back in the box.

Picture it: your 6-year-old grandson is inside, you're reading chapter two by flashlight, and the bedspread slides off the dining chairs onto everybody. The fort is over, and so is the chapter.

PBS KIDS shows a sturdier way, a rope-and-blanket tent.

Its newspaper fort has kids roll sheets into tubes and tape them into triangles. "The tighter the roll, the stronger the fort," PBS notes, which gives an 8-year-old a real engineering job.

Build it in front of the couch with the doorway facing your armchair, so you read from a real seat with the flashlight in your lap.

This one is about the harvest, not the growing. Keep a few herbs at waist height on a patio table or a sunny back step, so nobody kneels.

Let the grandchild pick the herb and the dish it goes in, then smell each sprig before it lands on the cutting board.

For perennial herbs, the kind that come back each year, Iowa State Extension says to cut only the top third so the plant regrows. Give a 5-year-old safety scissors and that one rule.

Hand your grandchild two fallen leaves before you head out and ask if they came from the same kind of tree. If neither of you knows, you've found your afternoon.

Fall is made for it. The Arbor Day Foundation's tree identification guides tell trees apart by leaf shape, bark and fruit, so collect one leaf per tree and match them up at home.

For more structure, print the National Park Service's free Junior Ranger scavenger hunt, made for a backyard or local park.

A grandchild with a phone can use the free Seek app from iNaturalist, which identifies plants through the camera, needs no account and is designed to be safe for kids.

Don't tell them where you're going. Give one clue every few miles instead: "It has a gift shop." "Some of them have stripes." For a 5-to-10-year-old, the guessing in the car is half the outing.

Choose the place first. The Association of Zoos and Aquariums keeps a directory of accredited zoos and aquariums. Search near home.

Then plan around your energy. Study the map online, pick three animals the child must see, and find the benches between them. Save the last clue for the parking lot: point at the sign.

Ask the question you may have been putting off: "Will you teach me your game?" Then hand over the controller. The American Academy of Pediatrics suggests exactly this, asking kids to show you around a favorite game and playing it with them.

Expect the first round to go like this: they explain too fast, you drive off a cliff, they laugh, then slow down and show you the one button that matters. By round three they're coaching.

If they don't have a favorite, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is rated E for Everyone, lets a family race together in one room, and costs about $59.99 on Nintendo's US store. Next visit, trade places and teach them the card game you always won.

Get out the shoebox of photos. Good pages start with a child's questions about each picture: Who's that? Where was this? Why is everyone dressed like that? Your answers become the captions, in the grandchild's handwriting.

Two supply rules. Work from copies or scans of anything you can't replace. And buy acid-free, lignin-free paper and sleeves, which the Library of Congress recommends for long-term preservation.

Your grandchild knows how to run a phone. You know the stories nobody wrote down. Put those together.

The free StoryCorps App guides the interviewer through questions, records the conversation, and lets you upload it to the StoryCorps Archive and the Library of Congress. A 13-year-old reading "What was your first job?" off the screen may get an answer you'd never have volunteered.

To keep it in the family, use your phone's voice recorder instead.

Sit side by side on the porch swing, phone on the cushion between you.

Board games solve a problem cards can't: the 3-year-old. HABA's First Orchard is cooperative, meaning everyone plays on one team, so nobody loses at an age when losing ends the fun.

For mixed ages, Connect 4 is the one worth owning: rated 6 and up, quick to set up, and the cheapest of the three here.

In early grade school, try Ticket to Ride: First Journey, a simplified version of a popular train game.

Keep one plastic bin of supplies that only comes out at your house.

A good start is Crayola's Mini Inspiration Art Case, about $18.99 at Target, with markers, crayons and coloring pages. It's labeled non-toxic and for ages 3 and up, and Target lists a small-parts choking warning for children under 3.

Then give the project a purpose: paint the herb pots, make a card for their mother's birthday, or decorate the scrapbook cover.

It takes a little planning. Text his parents the ingredients two days ahead. Prop your phone at eye level on a stack of cookbooks. Pick one short recipe, like the Veggie Omelet in a Mug from USDA's MyPlate recipes, made in the microwave.

An adult runs the microwave at each end. Then cook in parallel: you crack an egg, he cracks an egg. Eat your omelets on camera at the same moment.

Skip the planning and you get this: the phone propped against the sugar canister, your grandson in Ohio staring at the ceiling fan and half of your ear, and three minutes in, off he goes to find the dog.

Skip "How was school?" on your next call if you already know you'll get "Fine," and go straight to a game instead.

For a child who knows colors or letters, play I Spy. One person picks something they can see and gives a clue: "I spy something blue," or "something that starts with B."

Let the child carry the phone around their room while you guess. You'll see the bunk bed, the hamster and the new poster, which is the tour you wanted anyway.

For readers, play 20 Questions. One person thinks of a person, place or thing, and the other gets up to 20 yes-or-no questions to guess it. Make some answers about family: the lake where you learned to swim, your first car, the town where their parent was born.

Give the grandchild a few dollars and one mission: find something neither of you has ever eaten. On the drive home, ask the question that matters: "Would you buy that again?"

Before you go, check the USDA's National Farmers Market Directory for the market's location, hours, what it sells, and whether it takes EBT.

At the stall, the child asks the farmer the questions while you hold the bag. At home, cook the mystery vegetable together.

Start on paper. The National Archives offers free printable family-tree charts and activity sheets for kids. Print one and let the grandchild write the names while you supply them. Gaps show up fast, and each gap is an excuse to call a cousin.

When the paper version fills up, move it online. FamilySearch lets you build and share a family tree with a free account, so a 15-year-old in Denver and a 9-year-old across town can add to the same one.

Give the oldest grandchild the login. Give the youngest the paper chart and a box of colored pencils for the leaves.

The test: on the way home, can you each name three things that changed on the block since last time? A new mailbox, a cat in a window, a porch finally painted.

It doesn't have to be far to count. Short walks add up toward the weekly goal in the box below.

Stick to sidewalks or paths. At dusk, the National Institute on Aging advises reflective clothing or a flashlight. Hand the flashlight to the grandchild.

Your 4-year-old granddaughter hands you a plastic stethoscope and announces that you're sick. You were about to get up for the dress-up box. Stay put. You've just been given the best seat in the house: the patient on the couch.

On slow days, take the sitting-down roles: the patient, the customer at her restaurant, the student in her classroom. Answer in character. Order the soup, ask what's in it, complain that it's cold.

The American Academy of Pediatrics' report on play links pretend play with gains in language, social-emotional skills and executive function, the skills behind planning and self-control.

Pick the movie you loved at their age, or the one their parent wore out on videotape. Then match the rating to the youngest person on the couch.

The Motion Picture Association's ratings guide explains what G, PG, PG-13 and R mean, which helps when a 5-year-old and a 12-year-old share a blanket.

Make the popcorn together, with the grandchild shaking the pot or watching the bag puff in the microwave.

Pause once, at the part you remember best, and tell them where you were the first time you saw it. Then draw the curtains at 2 p.m. and pass the bowls.

One question sets up the whole hunt: can the child read? If not, draw picture clues. If so, write riddles.

Hide ordinary things from your own drawers: a wooden spoon in the flower bed, a clothespin on the fence, a measuring cup under the birdbath, a tennis ball in the watering can. Each find holds the next clue.

Stuck for ideas? The National Park Service posts ready-made hunts, including ones from Haleakalā's Junior Ranger page and Arches, that adapt easily to a yard or a neighborhood walk.

You sit in a lawn chair as base camp. The grandchild runs each find back to you, which keeps the hunt moving while you stay put. The last clue points to the cookie jar.

Watch for discount days. Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta runs $20 Tuesdays, with $20 general admission on select Tuesdays in 2026. With the year nearly over, check which dates are left and whether the deal returns in 2027.

Or think small. The UGA Aquarium on the Georgia coast lists children's admission at about $6. A smaller building means less walking, and a 4-year-old can be perfectly happy with one tank she can press her nose against.

Start this one soon, because it keeps going between visits. Here's the setup.

1. Choose the pots together. Most vegetables can grow in containers, so let the grandchild pick something she'd actually eat.
2. Set the biggest pots on plant caddies, low wheeled stands, so you roll them instead of lifting.
3. Call your county extension office, the local arm of your state's university, and ask what to plant this time of year where you live.
4. Plant on a visit, and push a wooden ruler into the soil beside each plant.
5. Same day every week, photograph each plant next to its ruler and text it to your grandchild. She reads the height and adds it to a chart on her fridge.
6. At the next visit, check her numbers against the real thing, then harvest together.

The first picture shows a seedling and a ruler; by the last one, you're cooking what grew.