In this episode, we’re going to talk more about family fun nights. Last time we talked about a whole lot of ideas for events you can have together in your family. A lot of those were for large families, so today I’m going to give you ideas for how to have a family fun night when you have a smaller family, even if it’s just mom or dad and a child.
The reason I’m talking about family fun nights is because I feel like they’re such a big part of family closeness and togetherness. Plus, a lot of them use food, or are to do with food, and include a way to eat that’s different to the norm, and that’s lots of fun. So, today we’re going to talk about some more ideas for family fun nights, and how to do them when you have a smaller family.
I have a friend who has a boy of eight – such a special mom and amazing kid. Their dad owns a couple of restaurants, and he’s pretty much always out in the evenings, so it’s very hard for them as a family to do anything like a family fun night, and I was thinking about how they could make it work. I think it’s actually a great opportunity for spending time together. It’s similar to if you have a big family and then mom or dad spends time with one of the children – a special meal, or a special outing with just a parent and one particular child. These are very important to do in big families so that you get your one on one, close time with each child, but it’s just as important in a small family, or even in a family where it’s one parent and one child.
Somehow, when you’re focused on that time with the child, even if you’re together for most of the time, during that special time, you focus on them more than usual. You talk about stuff that you have in common. You ask them specific questions. You kind of really build a relationship, and work on that relationship by having good chats and a good time together.
So, in the same way, a family fun night can be something that a small family, or a mom and child, or a dad and child can do together. It can just be something really easy that you both enjoy, like playing some board games or playing some kind of sports games, indoor or outdoors. Or it can be something like the fool’s dinner where you just do it for the two of you and you laugh a lot and just have fun. You can modify whatever it is so that it fits the two of you. For an older child, you could do a quiz game where the mom acts as the person asking the questions, and puts the child as the contestant on the spot, and gives them rewards. For a younger child, the mom could do something like the fun fair – she could have the different games arranged with prizes, and the child has the coins, and then she kind of runs the show, while the child is the one at the fun fair or at the food fair, doing the activities or eating the food. Mom or dad arranges the event and the child kind of participates. You can even swap around if the child wants to be a stallholder or have a game that mom plays. It works just as well with smaller families.
We have a family fun night download for you that has coins, scorecards, and lots of signs for a funfair, a menu for the fool’s dinner, and a whole lot of other fun things. So, have a look for that download at the end of this post.
So, I really love this first game I’m going to tell you about, because it’s great for doing in between courses at the table. It helps everybody relax, be at the table longer, laugh, and chat. This game uses paper – there’s lots of variations – you can do it with stories, or drawings of monsters or animals. Basically what you do is each person has a piece of paper and a pencil and then mom instructs everybody – say we’re doing monsters. Everybody must then draw the top of the monster’s head, and then they fold the paper down so there’s only a little part sticking out, and then they pass the paper to the person to their left. That person mustn’t peep at what the previous person drew. Then they draw the rest of the monster’s head. Then you fold it down so it’s mostly covered with a little bit of your drawing sticking out at the bottom and you pass the paper onto the left again. Then the next person will draw the monster’s neck, leave a little bit sticking out, and pass it on. The next person will draw the monster’s body, and pass it on. And lastly, the legs and maybe the feet. You can be as creative as you want. And then we fold them up all the way and then the last person to hold the paper will open it and laugh away, and then show everybody what their strange creations look like. Then you can pass them around and everyone can see what they are.
You can do the same thing with animals. You can do the head and that will be maybe the head of a giraffe and then somebody else will draw the body of a crocodile. Somebody else will draw the legs of a flamingo and then the hooves of a cow. That’ll be a very strange looking animal at the end. This is great for small children to keep them focused at the table.
In the other variation, you use a story. It’s the same concept, but then each person writes a part of the story. So mom can say, we’re going to do the introduction – who the characters are and where they are. Then after everyone fold and passes their papers, the next thing they have to write could be something scary that happened, or an exciting occurrence. And then later on, something that goes wrong and what they did. You decide what the parts should be. At the end of the story, you would say, let’s write the conclusion. We try to have at least four, maybe five or six parts of the story before reading it. Each part shouldn’t be too long. When you unroll the page, and you find the whole story, then each person reads their particular story, which will be all mixed up with the other stories, and that’s very funny.
Another fun thing to do at the table between courses is Mad Libs. It’s easy to find them online and print them out. Often they’re specifically for events like Thanksgiving, and that makes it extra funny. You just download the page, which has a story with words left out. One person will ask another one, give me a verb or an action word, give me a noun or an object, a person, a famous person or a place and they just fill in whatever words come to mind. When you read the story, it can be quite ridiculously funny. This is also a great one to do in a small family, especially when there are two of you, then one of you can ask and the other one can give the words and then you can read the story.
You could have a how to cook night where you choose a recipe in advance with whoever’s going to be cooking it. It should be something that they’re excited to try and learn to cook or bake. It’s fun to set the time aside to do that together. And then you get to eat it at the end.
Sometimes we like to do a night where we look at photos and videos from the past. Then we’ll have a snacky meal – maybe finger foods. Any kind that you guys like, for example, sausages, sausage rolls, puff pastry tarts, crudités with dips; anything that works with fingers. Then we sit around in the living room where the projector is, and each person gets to request what they want to look at. Maybe they’ll say my second birthday party, or when I was ten and we went on holiday on vacation, or something like that. So you get to see a whole lot of photos, memories, while you eat your snacky dinner.
A formal evening is often quite fun. Everybody has to dress in really formal clothes and you eat really fancy food. You can try and find takeout that is more fancy than usual. Sometimes just eating small things can make it fancier. For example, for the first course everybody has one or two spare ribs, or perhaps you have a fancy soup for the starter. So, if you’re up to cooking it at home, again, just smaller courses of anything really can be fun, and can make the meal a little bit more gourmet. If you have members of the family who like to cook gourmet food, then that works great. You can also take photos of yourselves in your fancy clothes, and of your food that you’re eating. Set the table in a beautiful formal way with fancy glasses and under plates. We have gold knives and forks which we love to use.
So, similar to this one is a history night, which is great for homeschoolers. You choose a time period, or you choose a particular part of history, and then everyone dresses up in clothes that relate to that historical event or time period. You can research it and find ideas for the kind of food they would have eaten. Sometimes you can even do reclining instead of sitting at a table, or standing, depending on how they would have eaten at that time in history.
A dessert night or an ice cream sundae night are extremely fun. For the ice cream sundaes, you get to build your own using different flavors of ice cream, and different toppings. And on dessert nights you would have a few different desserts that everybody can try. Or perhaps you play games involving desserts. One of these is the chocolate game, where you have a dice, and everybody gets a turn to throw it. When someone gets a six, they quickly have to put on a scarf and gloves, and then grab the knife and fork and then try to cut a piece of chocolate with the knife and fork and eat it, and they can carry on until the next person throws a six at which point they have to stop take off the gloves and scarf and let the next person have their chance. Also, for dessert night, you could do a menu of different desserts, and have people order what they want, like at a restaurant. Again, you can buy a few desserts for this and divide them up. You don’t have to make everything – that makes it a bit more relaxing for mom.
And, of course, a simple restaurant-at-home night can be fun. Perhaps if you have older children, each of them could be responsible for making one course, and you could have a couple of options. Then you could have menus and everybody could order. The younger children could be the waiters and waitresses. Everybody gets to have what they’d like.
Also, a concert night is lots of fun, if you imagine a fancy music concert. It doesn’t have to be music though; everybody could do whatever they’re good at. So it could be poetry, reading, dancing, piano, other musical instruments that they play, or any skill that they want to showcase. Some kids love doing magic tricks. You could do this after dinner, or you could incorporate dinner. If it has a few courses, then you could do one thing in between each course. It doesn’t even have to be a fancy meal. You could do this with takeout pizza and make the focus on enjoying the concert, and making the children feel special with lots of clapping, and maybe some awards or certificates afterwards. This works great, especially at the end of a year when there’s things that children want to show.
We personally have what we call graduations for each child for each grade. Then they’ll get to show all the schoolwork they’ve done that year. They’ll get to show things they made or researched, or lap books that they created, and talk about all the things that they remembered and that they enjoyed. And then along with this we’ll have the concert or the showcasing of skills.
It’s lovely to have an event based on a different country, or perhaps an 80s, a 60s, or a 20s themed meal. But the country ones are our favorite. If you know of my other business, Case of Adventure, you’ll know that we create activity books and novels for different countries. We love to have a good country evening. So, say we choose Canada as our country. We’ll make Canadian flags, both a big one for the table, and small ones to stick into the food, and then we’ll make Canadian food. We’ll play any games that we know of that are Canadian. Perhaps we’ll watch a video of what it’s like in Canada. Sometimes when the children were smaller, we would even create an airplane with Canadian flags and all the trimmings, and then pretend that we’re flying to Canada. Sometimes you can find videos of flights landing in Canada, describing what you see out the windows. Then, once you’re there, you can visit the landmarks. So, that’s lots of fun.
Have you heard of the game fishbowl? It’s crazy! First, everybody writes words and puts them in a hat. You have pieces of paper and everyone writes random things – like hamburger, jump rope, or swim, or even King Charles – verbs or nouns that can be acted out. The amount of words depends on how long you want the game to go on for. Then we have two teams, and one team goes at a time. The team would choose a member to describe the word that they’ve picked from the hat for everyone to guess, and then the next word, and the next one. So, there’s a timer and in 30 seconds, they describe as many words as they can. Then the other team would have their turn doing the same thing, rotating the players so that everyone gets a turn, taking the words out of the hat until there’s none left. That’s the first round.
Then after that, when everyone’s a little bit more familiar with the words in the hat, then you have a second round; you put all the words back in the hat, and one team at a time again describes the words, but now you only get to say one word as a prompt. You can’t say the word itself, but you can say any other one word to describe it. So, maybe you’d say fast food if the word was hamburger. Well, that’s two words, fast food, but that’s allowed.
In the third round of Fishbowl, the word has to be acted out with no noise at all. By now people know the words pretty well, and it’s surprising how fast you can get what they are.
Then the final round, the fourth round, is quite fun. You put a sheet over the person and you have to act out the word with the sheet over you. It’s a great way to do it – kind of challenging, but lots of fun.
Most of these ideas, except the last one, are to do with food and happen around the meal. But there’s so many other options and ideas of family fun nights that don’t involve food, or that are in a totally different place – like camping in the woods or going on a picnic. I’ve tried to focus on ones at home because those are harder to think of.
So, if you have any ideas, please leave me a comment on the post for this podcast, which is on familyfoodformoms.com. I’d love to hear what you guys do!
Also, remember the download that goes along with the fun fair family fun night, and the Fool’s Dinner. There’s printables that have tokens for the food fair and also for the fun fair. There are also cards for the score, and various signs to put up everything that makes that night look cool and extra fun. And for the fool’s dinner there’s a cardboard dice that you can make, and the menu with preset places to write what people are going to choose from, and what implement they’re going to end up eating with.
Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time!
