Want to get some quality family time to reconnect with the kids? Convince your children to turn off the television and video games with these no-cost activities.

Also make sure that line is first on the main “Health and Well-Being” page, right now it starts with a tip and makes no sense.

• Cross out some nouns, verbs and adjectives in a story book. Then have the family replace them with random words of the same type. The new story is guaranteed to score laughs with your family.
• Create an at-home bowling alley with juice, soda or milk containers. Hit the “pins” by rolling an unopened soup can.
• Bake sugar cookies, including mixing, rolling, cutting the dough with cookie cutters and decorating the cookies.
• Create a kazoo by poking pencil holes into a toilet paper roll, covering one end of the roll with wax paper held by a rubber band, and blowing into the other end of the roll.
• For a toddler, hide a toy in a room and give the child simple directions to find it. One example would be, “Go in the living room and find the teddy bear on the sofa.” As your child gets better at the game, offer more complicated directions.
• For a toddler, show your child five or six items such as a stuffed animal, a book and a spoon. Name each object before putting it in a pillow case. Then have the child reach into the pillow case, feel an object and guess what it is.
• For an older child, help him or her start a business like a babysitting or lawnmowing service or lemonade stand. The child can strategize marketing, price points and sales tactics.

Want to get some quality family time to reconnect with the kids? Convince your children to turn off the television and video games with these no-cost activities.

Bonus tip for family car trips:

As a family, pick an object off in the distance, have children close their eyes and when someone thinks the car is passing the object they shout “Now!” Another version of this game is for older children to guess the distance of the object, then check the odometer as the car passes it to see how accurate the estimate was.