Boredom jar ideas: 40 prompts for kids (and why they work)

If you’ve searched “boredom jar ideas,” you already have the instinct right: instead of solving your child’s boredom for them, you want to give them a small nudge and let them solve it themselves. That’s the whole value of a boredom jar, and it’s quietly backed by a good deal of child-development research.

Below are 40 prompts you can write onto scraps of paper and drop in a jar today (and 60 more further down, if you want a fuller jar). But first, two minutes on what makes a boredom jar work, because the kind of prompt matters more than the jar.

What are the best bored jar ideas?

Forty, sorted into six kinds: making things, moving, going outside, imagining, quiet things, and helping. The full list is further down. The best ones are open-ended (“build something out of cardboard”) rather than step-by-step instructions, because the point of a bored jar is for the child to finish the idea themselves. The one hard rule: no screens in the jar.

Is a bored jar the same as a boredom jar?

Yes. “Bored jar”, “boredom jar” and “I’m bored jar” all mean the same thing: a jar of short written prompts a child pulls from when they say they are bored. The name varies from house to house. How it works does not.

What age is a bored jar for?

From about 5 or 6, most children can use one on their own, because that is roughly when they can keep self-directed play going for a stretch. Younger children can use one with an adult nearby, but not directing. Older children and tweens can use one too, though expect a week or two of resistance if they are used to on-demand entertainment.

Why a boredom jar beats handing over a screen

When a child says “I’m bored”, the easy move is to hand them a tablet. The boredom jar is the harder, better move, and here’s the reasoning.

Boredom is an uncomfortable feeling with a purpose: it’s the brain’s prompt to start generating its own ideas. In children, the system that does this, the default mode network, is still developing, and the conditions it needs are exactly the conditions of unstructured, slightly-bored time.^[3] Children who get that time develop the capacity for self-directed play and original thought. Children who are rescued from every bored moment get less practice at it.

The researcher Teresa Belton, interviewing creative adults about their childhoods, found that being allowed to be bored kept coming up as a common thread.^[1] And the psychologist Peter Gray has spent decades documenting how self-directed free play, the kind that grows out of boredom, builds self-regulation and problem-solving in ways adult-directed activities don’t.^[2]

A boredom jar works because it sits in the middle: it doesn’t rescue the child, but it doesn’t abandon them either. It hands the boredom back with a tiny push.

How to make the prompts work

• Keep them open-ended. “Build something out of cardboard” beats “make a specific craft”. The vaguer prompt sends the child into their own invention.
• No screens in disguise. “Watch a documentary” is not a boredom-jar prompt.
• Low prep. If a prompt needs you to set up for twenty minutes, it defeats the point.
• Don’t ask how it went. The play is theirs. Reporting back to you makes it a task.

40 boredom jar prompts

Make something

1. Build a den somewhere new
2. Make something out of cardboard and tape
3. Build the tallest tower you can, then knock it down
4. Invent a board game and teach someone the rules
5. Make a tiny museum on a windowsill
6. Draw a map of your home or garden
7. Make a comic strip about your day
8. Build a marble run out of anything
9. Make a paper aeroplane and test three designs
10. Create a treasure hunt for someone else

Use your body 11. Invent a new dance and perform it 12. See how long you can balance on one leg 13. Make an obstacle course in the garden or hallway 14. Have a slow-motion race across the room 15. Learn to do a cartwheel (or try) 16. Make up a secret handshake and practise it 17. Hop everywhere for the next ten minutes

Go outside 18. Find five different leaves and press them 19. Make a stick into something else 20. Watch the clouds and name their shapes 21. Build something out of stones or sticks 22. Look for the smallest creature you can find 23. Walk a familiar route and spot five new things 24. Make a nature collection

Use your imagination 25. Make up a story and tell it out loud 26. Invent a new word and use it ten times today 27. Pretend you’ve arrived from another planet and describe your home 28. Write a letter to your future self 29. Design an animal that doesn’t exist and name it 30. Be a detective and “investigate” one room

Quiet things 31. Read in the most unusual spot in the house 32. Draw the view from a window 33. Teach yourself to whistle, click, or wink 34. Make a list of your top ten anything 35. Write or draw in a notebook for ten minutes 36. Look closely at one small object for two whole minutes

Help and tidy 37. Reorganise your bookshelf however you like 38. Sort your toys into “keep” and “pass on” 39. Do one kind thing for someone without being asked 40. Plant a seed from something you ate

What else can go in a bored jar? 60 more ideas

Sixty more, sorted by how long they take:

Five minutes

41. Draw your hand without looking at the paper
42. Write your name in the fanciest letters you can invent
43. Close your eyes and count how many different sounds you can hear
44. Make up a tongue twister and say it three times fast
45. Find one thing in the house for every colour of the rainbow
46. Do twenty star jumps in a silly voice
47. Tell someone a joke, or make one up
48. Make shadow animals on the wall with a torch
49. Hum a song and get someone to guess it
50. Draw a self-portrait using only circles, squares and triangles
51. Fold a paper fortune teller and fill it with silly fortunes
52. Name an animal for every letter of the alphabet

Twenty minutes

53. Make a paper chain as long as the hallway
54. Fold a boat from foil and see how many coins it holds before it sinks
55. Make a sock puppet and give it a voice
56. Draw a menu for a pretend café, then take everyone’s orders
57. Make a bookmark for someone in your family
58. Learn one magic trick with a coin and practise it until it fools someone
59. Invent a secret code and write a message in it
60. Turn a shoebox into a bedroom for a soft toy
61. Draw your family tree, pets included
62. Design your own flag and decide what each colour means
63. Copy a picture from a book, but upside down
64. Write a recipe for a food that doesn’t exist

An hour or more

65. Write and illustrate a little book, folded and stapled down the middle
66. Rehearse a short play and perform it after tea
67. Make a newspaper about your home: news, weather and an interview
68. Make a road map for toy cars on the floor with masking tape
69. Draw a picture on card and cut it into your own jigsaw
70. Learn to finger-knit and make the longest wool rope you can
71. Fill a time capsule to open in a year
72. Plan a pretend holiday: where, how you’d get there, what you’d pack
73. Set up a shop with things from your room and write the price tags
74. Write a real letter to a grandparent or friend and post it
75. Learn a short poem by heart and recite it
76. Bake something simple with a grown-up nearby

Rainy day

77. Race two raindrops down the window
78. Make a rain gauge from a jar and check it tomorrow
79. Have an indoor picnic on the floor
80. Make salt dough and model a plate of tiny food
81. Play hunt the thimble with one small object
82. Set up skittles in the hallway with plastic bottles
83. Play sardines with everyone at home
84. Cut out paper snowflakes and see whether any two match
85. Sort the button tin, or a jar of odds and ends, by colour
86. Make instruments from pans, a bottle of rice and elastic bands
87. Put on wellies and find the biggest puddle
88. Make a sign for your bedroom door

Outside

89. Draw a hopscotch in chalk and invent new rules
90. Make a mud kitchen and serve mud pies
91. Make a bird feeder from a pine cone, lard and seeds
92. Paint a wall or fence with a brush and plain water
93. Make a daisy chain long enough to wear
94. Do a bark rubbing with paper and a crayon
95. Make a wind chime from old keys or spoons and hang it outside
96. Blow bubbles and see who can make the biggest
97. Go on a shape hunt: find a circle, a triangle and a square
98. Make a tiny garden in a pot or a corner of a flowerbed
99. Count every bird you see in fifteen minutes
100. Draw round each other’s shadows in chalk, then come back an hour later

What are good boredom busters for tweens and teens?

Ones that hand over real responsibility. Cook the family dinner from a set budget. Plan and lead a day out, from the route to the packed lunch. Learn one skill properly from a library book: juggling, knitting, a card trick. Build or fix something real. Start a comic or a zine. Train for a timed run around the block. Redesign their own room. From about 10 or 11, slips that sound like little-kid crafts tend to get rejected, so word them as challenges (“Cook something you have never made before”) rather than activities. Free, self-directed time still does the heavy lifting at this age, as Peter Gray’s work on play argues.^[2]

The caveat: tweens and teens often push back hardest, because a phone usually fills every gap. Expect a week or two of resistance, agree the ground rules with them rather than for them, and do not take the phone away while offering nothing in its place.

The shortcut

If you’d rather not cut up forty scraps of paper, the studio makes a ready-printed version, The Bored Box, with 30 open-ended cards plus a one-page parent’s note on the research above. There’s also a Summer Boredom Manifesto for the long holidays. But a real jar with your own scraps works perfectly. The jar was never the point. The point is the small, daily decision not to rescue, and to trust that the bored child in front of you knows what to do, given the chance.