Camping outside in nature is evidently a very enjoyable experience but a lot of times the climate is not our best friend and ends up as a hindrance to our outdoor plans and enjoyment.
In these situations, we would not want to make our younger siblings or kids sad, and it is a fantastic time to start planning to have a good experience through indoor camping while experiencing several endeavors in the meantime.
Luckily, we are here to give some nice ideas in order from how to set up an indoor tent without any problem for the kids’ enjoyment to help them have a beautiful time and be happy.
Building a Tent
The main thing of course is finding a good indoor camping tent. We have different options for finding a good one and if you have a clean enough camping tent which can be used to fit indoors, it is effortless then.
If you do not have one, there are plenty of play tents available on the internet which would help in setting up a wonderful camp for the kids and you can reuse it a lot of times if the kids want to do indoor camping a lot.
If you want to get a beach tent, you can get one for this activity as well as in the future you can take it to the beach for the whole family to enjoy. Using your kid’s mattress if you have a built-in tent in their bed is also a good idea.
The use of owned blankets and sheets would be the option which is the cheapest and to build it, here are the instructions to create a classic fort tent to use indoors –
You would have to take down this tent in a couple of days but you will be able to reuse it without any worries as it is a household item. For this, we can use three chairs minimum; we can drag them together and throw the blanket or sheet over the top of these three and use pillows or books or anything heavy to weigh down so that the sheet would not fall out.
Placing the chairs facing outside the tent will give more space for putting other things inside the tent and decorating it with pillows and lights. If you want a larger tent, you can use clips that bind together and attach two different sheets.
Being comfortable inside your tent is very important when you’re especially sleeping on the floor indoors or outdoors forest. It is important to help the kids understand how camping through these small indoor experiences so that it will help in the future when they have to go camping for summers and other seasons and it wouldn’t be so hard or difficult for them to cope and for this, we need to make sure the kids are comfortable in each situation and is not feeling strange because of these new changes. Due to this, always look for comforting soft sleeping bags, camping pads so that it wouldn’t be hard to rest and the kids can have a good night’s sleep.
Activities for Indoor Camping
After building a cute tent for the kids, the second important thing is to figure out activities that the kids would do or play inside so that it would be fun for both them and the parents. Here are ideas that would help in making this play space pleasurable.
1. Make a Campfire
Although we are indoors, we can still create the classic campfire dream come true but of course, it is a paper campfire that is handmade and unfortunately will not give you warmth but if you have surrounded yourselves with blankets, the cold would not a problem. Creating this campfire is very easy as well.
Using tree trunk slices or just crumpled dark brown thick papers are enough to make it look like real logs and adding orange-, red-, and yellow-colored thin papers like tissues helps in making it look like flames. You can also use led lights that look like flames or fire.
2. Snacking while Camping
Another most important thing while camping is the snacks we eat and make throughout the end of the adventure. The utmost popular and must-try snack while camping is s’mores which are made with toasted marshmallows and crackers.
First, we must toast the marshmallows carefully on the stove without burning them and at the same time, place one graham cracker, chocolate under the marshmallows for almost a quarter a minute and once we cook all of them, we add another cracker above to complete the snack.
Some other snacks kids would love to make and eat are popcorn, cones which are made for camp, burgers or hotdogs, or packet meals. The cool part of indoor camping is that you can cook easily as it is close, so we could just extend the camping by making a small picnic for the family inside itself.
3. Gaming while Camping
A fun thing about camping is always the games we play with people around us and these memories never leave our side even when we are old. We can still keep this at bay while indoor camping with fun games that are played indoors. Scrabbles, solving puzzles, nature bingo, and word games are classic games played while we are just indoors with family or friends.
Snake and Ladder is another board game where you play roles and see how long you can survive without being swallowed by a snake on the way. Roleplaying is another wonderful game where create a situation of your favorite kind and role-play as the character you wish to be. This could so imaginative that this game has no end, you could just continue where you left off even after days of not playing.
You can create a scavenger or treasure hunt inside the tent itself where you have to find the small clues and treasures hidden by anyone who wants to and in the end, the winner could be the next treasure hider.
4. After-Dark Adventures
Kids never listen when parents want them to sleep early so sometimes it is fun to just be and enjoy with them. They always love to play with flashlights and lanterns. With these, we can have whole plotted puppet shows or just making the beams look like big stars over the blanket.
Kids also could play limbo with a flashlight where the purpose of the light beam is to be a limbo pole; other games include cute and small games like traveling through space or flashlight tag.
Another amusing idea is glow-in-the-dark items like ring tosses, necklaces, glow sticks, bracelets, rings, etc. and by these, you can have a lot of fun like creating a concert with your kids, sing together, and do karaoke songs. By adding these glowing stickers and other glowing items, you can play carnival games like tossing rings over bottles and rewarding everyone who wins.
5. Reading and Creating while Camping
The kids are growing and absorbing and figuring out their interests each day and it is such a great idea for creating activities that include reading books of whatever genre they prefer and taking creative hobbies like crafting and painting seriously and help in exploring and finding out the things your kids like to do and does not.
Reading camp-themed books help in building their interest in how big the camping world is and how much they can discover if they want to. They also shouldn’t be limited to make or read only one thing but should be encouraged to create what they love no matter how messy the room gets.
6. Sleep Under the Stars in Camp
Sleeping under the stars is always such a beautiful adventure. We could watch the stars twinkle and shine while we play guessing which of them the constellations are. Although we cannot see the real stars in indoor camping, it would such a nice feeling to see pretty lights hung all over like stars and you can talk and watch it glow for a long time.
This is such a beautiful view that sleeping under them is like heaven. Hanging them from the ceiling top or over the blanket helps the tent look warmer and comforting to the kids and it wouldn’t hurt their eyes as well.
7. Camping with Friends
Camping with yourself is quite fun but camping with your friends is far better and more fun and so it is always a great idea to invite your best friends for indoor camping and a sleepover. Let the kids invite their friends over to make their indoor camping experience better. Playing games, eating a lot of yummy snacks, and spending time with the people we love is all we need to have the greatest day.
8. Movies while Camping
Ending the day with a movie is a great way to reminisce about our indoor camping experience. Making some of your favorite snacks for bedtime while putting on a classic movie and watching it together is an amazing family bonding activity as well. Several movies are specifically about camping like The Great Indoors and The Parent Trap which can make your kids more excited and interested in camping.
9. Challenging and Camping
It is never a bad idea to create challenges and make everyone else do it. If you invite a bunch of friends for indoor camping, it would be more fun to do them. Several challenging games can be played among each other which helps in having a wonderful time with everyone you love but also learn so much about each other – their likes, their dislikes, their limits, what makes them happy or sad, etc.
Try Not to Laugh Challenge is where you can make as many jokes as you want to, make funny faces, and doing a lot of silly things to make others laugh and if anyone laughs, they lose. This is where you are challenged for your ability to control to keep a straight face and not laugh over anything!
Another great and classic game Truth or Dare where we must choose any one of ‘truth’ or ‘dare’ where if we choose ‘truth’, you must answer a question truthfully, and if you choose ‘dare’, you must do a task that anyone says. For all turns, you can choose any one of them only and if you don’t follow the game, you will be challenged to do something else!
10. Guessing and Messing Up
There are games we can play while also learning about words and educating ourselves. Games like Dumb Charades and Pictionary help in these. Dumb Charades is a game when your group will be divided into teams and each team’s one chosen member will be given a word or sentence to act it out without talking or writing it down.
If any team figures the word out, they will win a point. We can use movies, song names, games, etc. as the topic of words for guessing and make your own flexible rules; in the end, all it matters if you had fun or not. In Pictionary, you just guess what someone is drawing in the process of drawing it; just like Dumb Charades but you cannot talk or do actions but only draw them.
11. Stories while Camping
Another wonderful way to make your indoor camping experience good is when you share a lot of the stories you have on your mind. If it is a group of people, we can share a lot of stories about our daily events, fairy tales, or something we make up ourselves.
We can also play this amusing game called Story Completion where a person starts a story by saying a sentence like “Once there was a..” and then each person continues the story by adding their parts; this could be very funny in the end where you will be having laughing fits.
12. Dancing while Camping
Getting in the mood to dance with everyone is an exciting way to end the day, you can have a lot of fun in the end and then just rest well for the night. You can choose your music and play some karaoke if you are in the mood to sing and dance. This will help us break the ice if you don’t feel too well and help it making everyone feel so much better!
Conclusion
There are a lot of ways in making indoor camping look super fun just like the experience of outdoors and you can have a beautiful day with your family and friends if you wish to try it once. These are just some ideas to help you understand how indoor camping helps you lift your mood from everything happening around us or if you are unable to do outdoor plans.
