Ideas for entertaining 9 yr old grandson

It means a thread which is old but you can still add to it and therefore, living but dead !!

Although actually, it's not dead at all and I'm grateful for all your ideas and will certainly try the sandpaper printing onto t-shirt idea.

So keep the ideas coming please....

Doesn't it just mean an out of date thread that has been resurrected ?

What does what mean? I suspect that is a question to NotAGran55 rather than to me. Yes, what the hell is a ZOMBIE thread?

What does that mean?

My grandchildren love making up a story. One of them begins with "once upon a time" and maybe continues with a prince, a little boy or even a zombie. After one or two sentences, the next one has to take over and so on and so on. The stories become increasingly bizarre and there is much laughter and many attempts to get them back on track. This game has occupied at least an hour each time we play it.

Oh dear - I have just realised that this is a ZOMBIE thread ( as they say on Mumsnet)

A dart board on the garden shed was very popular when my boys were that age . Fun and educational at the same time .

Playing clay and building blocks is also a good idea. Children usually tend to do it every time until it's perfectly made. Also, they are very eco friendly, you can find it on Amazon.

I recently did t-shirt printing with my granddaughter and hers looked much better than mine! Buy an inexpensive plain t-shirt and use sandpaper to print on it. It's really easy, check it out on YouTube

Oh yes I forgot..... A really BIG cardboard box kept him happy for literally HOURS!!!

My gs will kick a ball back and forth for hours, or we kick it into a bucket in turns, he loves cooking especially enjoying making his own pizza, scones and Rocky Road. We always do a bit of pond dipping, we play Bagatelle, 20 Questions, do jigsaws, paint, draw, model with home made play doh, leaf printing, do a bit of planting and bug hunting in the summer. table tennis in the garden in the summer,, he also loves watering all my house plants, playing with and sorting my button tin, playing with toy cars and garage (all from charity shop) eating.....he loves a chimpanzees' tea party which is just a selection of goodies laid out on a big plate to choose from, we always settle down for a hour TV in the afternoon with a cuppa and a biscuit. He's adorable.

Salt dough. Dry very thoroughly. Paint and decorate.
Plaster of Paris. Clean out all your kitchen cupboards and drawers. Old photos. Write up a story of your life and illustrate. Music - jazz, classical, etc as many types as possible using utube. Kim’s game. BBC catch-up has some great film by Gordon Buchanan of raising and releasing brown bears in Russia, very educational and inspiring with more energy than other similar programmes. By the time he helps cook, eat and wash up every day too, the time is going to fly by.

Make Pom poms with a Pom Pom maker
all my grandchildren liked that.
Make marble runs out of tubes
Build the biggest Lego tower you can
Sticker books great fun
Maze and puzzle books
Keep balloon in air without letting it touch the ground
Hide things around the house to be found
Hope you both have fun

We did some cooking: tomato, onion and cheese flaky pastry whirls; but the most fun was quite unexpectedly, using my walker to zip down the slope to the drive!

Make salt dough then use it to make models or figures and paint them.

I forgot to thank you Daddima for the suggestion to learn signing.
I sign but dgs doesn't, so we'll definitely be doing that.

I learned the signing alphabet as a child and taught it to my sister and what fun we got from being able to talk about our parents!
It's a little more complicated nowadays, whole phrases and new expressions - and I do have a bit of trouble seeing people's hands as well - but I'll persevere.

What a wonderful lot you are and with such brilliant suggestions.

I should explain that dgs is with me only from 7am until 4:30-5pm when Mum gets back from work.

He's here all this week and from 21-26th, that being part of the long school holidays. In between he'll be at a holiday programme.

I live in a suburban area, the street is owned by a charity and all pensioners, so no local children.

We're confined here because I don't walk well and a visual handicap means I can't use public transport. The idea that we collect leaves and things in our lovely, tree-lined street is good though.

He will have some approved DVDs which he can watch on my small portable machine (and David Attenborough is his all time favourite) but Mum prefers he does other, creative, constructive things - as do I.

We will be doing domestic work - he's going to help me plant jalapeno peppers into a tub as they are now large enough in their seed box, and we'll do some pruning of the pelagonium which has gone a bit wild and silly.

Cooking is definitely on the menu - we'll be making Pet au Soeur this morning, mainly for its title but because he also loves cinnamon and it's an easy thing to make.

As it was National Shortbread Day yesterday, that'll be given a whirl as well.
THANK YOU ALL

Activities for my boys at the age of nine included:
Origami/paper planes/paper modelling
Reading fact/fiction
Knitting/cross stitch
Cooking/baking/making sweets
Conducting science experiments
Learning/performing magic tricks
Cleaning/washing/ironing
Gardening
Board games/cards/dominoes
Active games e.g. Twister/memory games/treasure hunt
Arts/crafts

Looking at the list and having just hosted my 'boys' (now in their late twenties) during Christmas I realise that they still enjoy doing most of the above activities and when they were here they pretty well reverted to being nine years old in terms of their playfulness.

I used to do scientific experiments or projects with my GCs. They loved them and the messier the better! Some examples here but many more on Google search.
www.noguiltmom.com/very-simple-science-experiments/

We taught our 9 and 6 y.o. GS to play pontoon and trumps over the Christmas holidays, the loved it. They also enjoy word games such as Sue mentioned. Another they like is pick a category for example animals, write it down, they then have to ask questions "does it fly/swim has it got fur" to discover what's written down.
Our 9 y.o. also loves lego and can follow the instructions to make complicated models independantly

Set him to work!! Seriously, they love to feel useful. Yesterday my 7 year old GS barrowed all the wood round from the wood store to near the house so life would be easier for me. He loved it! - he felt like the real man of the house and knew he was doing something purposeful. I did it with him - we counted logs, worked out the best direction to have the barrow to get it up a step, admired the different shapes of the logs, worked out how best to stack them so the stack would not fall down, admired and rescued spiders etc. etc. He then spent a long time helping me get the Christmas tree down, and to put the decorations in store.

He had a brilliant time, and his Mum has been on the phone to say how much he loved it.

We also played chess - my goodness, that boy is so good at it - he wipes me off the board in about 10 minutes!!!

I was assuming the lad was recovering from surgery/ illness and that was keeping him housebound!

I taught all our children and older grandchildren the British Sign Language alphabet.

youtu.be/WGEKXi517xA

You can use it to spell out the names of things to collect around the house, ask and answer quiz questions, or anything you can think of really. Ours all loved the idea that they could talk ‘ in secret’!
It’s a good skill to have too.

I know he can't go out. He can do this all on paper at the table. Writing down what he would pass on the way is a memory test. Presumably he goes out normally, whether walking or by car.

Oops..posted too soon...and photography. Maybe he could plan and create a photographic diary of his,stay with you. Otherwise as others have said..cards, board games etc all popular too.