Kids young and old can get in on the act with this project.  The older the kids are, the more of the set-up they can do.  Younger kids will enjoy the resulting product when adults or older siblings get things going.

Create a 'museum' that appeals to the five senses.  Include textures, smells, tastes, sounds and sights.  You can put the taste and smell items in small bowls (monitor children's choices to make sure everything is safe).  See if the kids can identify the scent or taste of flour, vanilla, vinegar, or cinnamon.  Set up a listening station with headphones to share new types of music.  Put unusual items in paper bags or other opaque containers to feel and guess what they are.  Lay out a crawling course with carpet scraps, pillows, bare floor, yarn and other tactile sensation-producing textures.  Try crawling or walking over towels, tape, and newspaper.  Make an area to share paint mixing fun or rainbow-producing prisms. 

 Get a bag of colored candies and a few bowls.  Try these math activities!

For younger children, sort the candies into colors and count each color.  Which has more?  Which has less?  Which are the same?  How many more blue than red?  Try some one-to-one correspondance: are there enough yellows to match up with each green?  Add two colors together and see how many that makes. 

Older children can work with fractions.  If you put the number of candies in the color bowl over the total number of candies, you can figure out the fraction of the total.  Can you change it into percent?  How about decimal fraction?  Toss in some ratio problems too: What is the ratio of red candies to green?  Which two colors have the highest ratio?  Which are nearly the same? 

Have the kids create some story problems about their candies.  This is often the weakest area in math understanding: application.  By having kids create their own math problems, you will be helping them step closer to being able to use math skills in everyday life.

 Choose a favorite book or story and get dramatic!  Have your kids create a script with stage directions and dialog.  Design props and scenery using household items.  Practice the play, then perform it for an appreciative audience. 

For a twist or a change of pace, see if you can create a slide show of the play.  Script writers  need to plan separate scenes that can be frozen in time, then narrated.  It's a different sort of a challenge, but if you take pictures of the scenes and record the narration, you end up with a work of dramatic art.

 Set aside a tabletop or even a shoebox to host your small scene.  Look around the house for items that will stand in for common things you might like to depict.  Small mirrors from make-up compacts make nice ponds, matchboxes can be furniture, buttons could be plates on a table, and toothpaste caps make delightful miniature lamp shades.  You can even get foods into the act: cereal circles make good tires, square cereal bits make nice furniture, gumdrops can be put together to make people.  You can use hot glue to assemble your scene or icing to stick food products to each other.

 No, you don't need to wait until Easter.  Dig out the plastic eggs and load each one with something to read- alphabet letters for preschoolers, sight words for young readers, directions of varying levels of difficulty for older kids.  Hide the eggs and send the hunters off to find them and read them.  Older children can follow the directions contained in each egg.  Need to play this game with a range of age levels?  Color code the eggs!  Put the easy items in green eggs, middle items in yellow ones or tough things in the red ones. 

 Find an old calendar and make some math happen.  Ask kids to total all the Thursdays, or subtract the third Monday from the fourth.  Add up all the days to see what the total is.  Use a month for each child and have a competition to see whose Tuesdays are worth more points (add up the dates).  Which day of the week has the highest total? 

Cut apart the days and have young children put the numbers into the correct order.  Try counting the days backwards, too, and laying out the numbers you need to count by two's, three's or five's.  Use two months' worth of cut up dates and play Memory with the pieces (match the numbers). 

 You'll need lots of newspaper and a little bit of masking tape for this project.  Fold sheets of newspaper into thick strips, about two to three inches wide.  You'll want about 15-20 strips. Tape five to seven of them side by side by fastening one end down to the table.  Use more strips to weave between the taped strips, placemat style.  Keep them as tight as possible, and when you get done weaving, bind all the edges with the tape so you have a giant "placemat".  Presto!  You have a magic carpet!  Use your magic carpets to engage in pretend play while you listen to stories or pretend to fly to faraway places.

 Gather a collection of household items into an opaque bag.  Make sure all are safe to touch without looking.  Gather a group of players and begin a story.  Pass the bag to the first player who takes an objecct out without looking and adds that item into the tale.  Keep passing the bag and having the next author work the new item into the story.  Whoever chooses the last thing from the bag has to find a way to tie up the plot and end the tale.

Add a twist for older children by doing this in writing instead of out loud.  You can also post the on-going story on the fridge and take turns adding to it all day long.

 Find a familiar story that has both a book and video version.  Share both with your children, and ask them to point out the differences and similarities between the two.  What small details are different?  What large things were changed?  What did the two have in common?  If you want to make the activity even more educational, try creating a Venn Diagram to show the differences and similarities.

 This activity can be created by parents or care givers for young children to enjoy, or it can be a project for older children to do and share with younger siblings.  You need several small slips of paper, something to write with, and a prize to put at the end of the trail.

Make a series of clues that lead to the next clue.  These can be as simple as a picture of the next place to look for a clue (like a picture of a bed), to a simple sentence or phrase that tells where to go, all the way up to an obscure riddle that children must think hard to figure out.  You can also introduce new vocabulary that will send them running to the dictionary to learn new words, if you wish (like use the word 'range' for stove).  Hide the clues so that children find the first clue, and it tells them where to look for the next.  At the end of the trail, hide a small prize or treat.