When rainy weather hits and the inside’s beckoning — and your kids are begging for electronics time — try some of these fun, educational activities that do use electronics but encourage your kids to learn new things while they’re playing.

Rainy Day Activities for Toddlers and Younger Children

PBS Kids has a great learning section that includes sing-along songs, videos, counting and sorting games, problem-solving games and much more.

SesameStreet.org, whose mission is to help kids grow smarter, stronger, and kinder, also offers tons of games on its website, like wordplay, art and videos.

Starfall.com is another education website that offers fun games to introduce littles to reading, basic maths, shapes and phonics.

If the youngsters start whining, invite them to try one of the challenges from the Earth Science Jr. website. Draft your older kids to help with creating a magic milk experiment or judging a Lego-building challenge.

Rainy Day Activities for Teens

CoolMath (age 13 and up) and its sister site CoolMath4Kids.com (age 3 to 12) brands itself as an “amusement park of maths and more” and challenges kids to play games that introduce advanced maths (pre-algebra, pre-calculus) or basic number skills.

Rainy Day Activities for Everyone

Indoor Science Activities

You can’t go wrong with National Geographic Kids, which features games and videos on everything from weird but true facts about animals and insects, a virtual tour of world cities and lots more.

Are your children determined to be the next Sid the Science Kid or Doc McStuffins? Introduce them to MakeMeGenius.com, a site that offers science, jokes, see and learn, and videos for kids in grades 1 through 8.

Musical Activities

Have a budding rock star at home? Check out Kids Guitar Zone, which offers free online guitar lessons. If your kid wants to tickle the ivories, several different websites give free online piano lessons. This resource offers links to many more sites that offer free online music lessons for kids.

It’s wonderful when your home is filled with the sounds of kids playing well together, but if you’re inside for any length of time, eventually patience and tempers wear thin so you might want to try something else.

Indoor Physical Activities

Get everyone moving with workout videos fun for the whole crew and only require YouTube and some open space to dance and jump around.

Career Ideas & Learning

If your kiddo participates in fundraisers or decided to set up a lemonade stand during the neighbourhood yard sale, why not introduce her to some professions—like real estate— that use many of the skills she’s learning in school. Real estate is a complex field that requires skills in maths, science, English, social studies, and home economics.

By incorporating real estate-based lessons into your curriculum, you can help students gain valuable skills in practical maths application, presentation giving, forming a persuasive argument, earth science and so much more.

It’s raining. It’s pouring. But time inside sure isn’t boring!

How to Make Learning Fun

Chances are, if you sit the kids down and say, “OK, everyone – today we’re going to practice our maths skills,” they’ll run you out of the house. But when you fire up the YouTube and put your left foot (and then your right foot) in and shake them all about, it’ll be hard for them to resist.

When you’re solving maths equations to blast aliens from the sky, your kids will insist they can do it faster and better. When you’re looking up weird dinosaur facts, they’ll scramble to outweird your facts!

Go ahead and put these online resources to work guilt-free—they’ll keep everyone entertained while teaching them new things, too!

This article was written for The Conscious Parent Company by guest blogger, Jenny Wise of specialhomeeducator.com