Low-Cost Family Activities
It's easier than you might think to entertain your family without breaking your budget, with plenty of options to theme parks, movies and restaurants. It's easier than you'd expect to find inexpensive community theater shows, concerts and other family-friendly entertainment in newspaper listings. At home, you can reintroduce reading together and playing cards and board games to have fun and strengthen family ties.
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At Home
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Movies are still affordable family entertainment, as you can bypass high ticket with cheaper DVD rental options. Vox Magazine notes that rentals from a subscription service such as Netflix cost just a little more per month than a single ticket purchase, and DVD kiosks that rent new releases for $1.00 per day for a three-day rental in some locations.
Board games can easily provide an evening's worth of family entertainment, and many classics can be found at dollar stores and thrift shops. Families with older children might enjoy brain teasers like Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit, while families with young children should opt for games such as Monopoly or Life, where luck plays more of a role, to level the playing field.
During Holidays
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On Independence Day, plan your activities around your town's fireworks display. Even if fireworks are legal in your locale, it's still a much safer, less expensive and more impressive display than you'd enjoy at home. Many locations also offer free or inexpensive family-friendly entertainment, such as concerts and cookouts on the Fourth. Some mid-sized and larger towns hold parades with floats and marchers from local community groups and veterans' organizations.
During the autumn, visit a local orchard to pick your own apples and pumpkins for Thanksgiving pies and Halloween carving. Many orchards also offer inexpensive activities such as hayrides or tours through their cider mills or processing facilities.
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In the City
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If you live near or in a city, your local museum can provide inexpensive family fun. Natural history museums offer exhibits children find particularly impressive, such as reconstructed dinosaur skeletons, and many offer interactive exhibits that allow children to control the exhibit through a console or touchscreen. Planetariums offer spectacular, low-cost shows, with presentations ranging from sights in the local night sky to computer-generated imagery depicting the birth of our universe during the big bang. Some planetariums also allow visitors to examine the heavens through their observatory's telescope on certain nights.
Outdoors
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Take your family for a picnic at your local park for an inexpensive outdoor outing. Many parks offer tennis and basketball courts for family games, and if your park is located on a lake, rent a boat or go fishing on a public pier. If you live near the ocean, you can enjoy a day of swimming, building sand castles, and throwing the Frisbee for no more than the cost of gas and parking. If your family enjoys sports, attend a high school or college game as a budget-friendly alternative to major league ticket prices.
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- Photo Credit family of four stand in autumn park image by Pavel Losevsky from Fotolia.com
