Fun Activities for the Penny-Pinching Parent

Families are saving money wherever they can, with more of them pulling their children out of daycare and skipping expensive summer classes and camps. That can leave parents with many more hours to fill to keep kids entertained and engaged.

We have a 3-year-old daughter who, fortunately, doesn't notice that we're in a recession, and is obliviously happy living on the cheap. Here are some of the fun activities we take part in for nothing, or next to nothing:

• The library. They offer much more than books. The San Jose branches hold story times in different languages, such as a Vietnamese-English session, as well as music, puppeteers, and crafts. Others have family movie nights, as well as websites with links to museums, cultural centers, and zoos.

• Museum trips. Plan your visits strategically: Wait for free days or discounted hours. We go to our great local children's museum promptly at 4, when admission is cut from $8 each to $4. It closes at 5, but you can cover the place in an hour. 

• The Great Outdoors! Few things are as entertaining for a child as a hollow log or a creek or a tree with squirrels chasing each other up and down it. County and state parks may have parking fees, but some have a pay-what-you-can donation box. For ideas on what to do with a kid outdoors, check out the book I Love Dirt!

• Water holes. Kids are fascinated with the properties of water, and instead of going to water parks, we've scoped out all the parks, plazas, and malls that have fountains or water-spray features. One day we killed half an hour at a tiny outdoor mall by dangling our feet in a fountain, and my daughter wasn't even embarrassed when I scooped up coins from the bottom for her to toss in. Even wishes are recyclable.

• The mall. This one may seem counter-intuitive, but the mall itself can be a cheapskate's haven, if you can refrain from buying anything. Ditto for Ikea, with its supervised play areas. Stick to window shopping!

My colleague Mark Frauenfelder wrote a couple weeks back about "becoming more involved with the production of our food." While I'm not likely to raise my own chickens anytime soon, he's onto something, and you can help your child learn more about where food comes from by simply taking him or her along shopping at the supermarket, especially ethnic markets, which have an incredible variety of items (including fish with heads!). We took our daughter to a you-pick strawberry farm, where we all learned how organic vegetables and fruits are grown –– and got a small, 15-minute glimpse of how back-breaking and hard it must be to pick fruit for a living. Here's a national guide.

On a rainy day, you can even combine a hands-on activity with your efforts to rehabilitate your credit rating, as this blog shows, in a tongue-in-cheek way.

Landon Hall – A freelance writer in Silicon Valley, Landon was a reporter, sports writer and editor at The Associated Press in Portland and New York City from 1997-2006.