Grandparents Day Activities Every Age Can Do Together

The best way to spend Grandparents Day is to bring one small thing to make together, and then actually make it alongside them. Not set it out for the kids and supervise. Sit down, pick up a pen, and be the person at the table who isn't sure how this is going to turn out either.

Grandparents Day 2026 lands on Sunday, September 13. You don't need a plan bigger than that. You need one activity everyone can do at the same table, at the same time, without anyone feeling put on the spot.

Quick Summary: What to do on Grandparents Day

• Plan one thing ahead of time: the visit doesn't need saving, it needs something on the table.
• Pick an activity that can't be done wrong: what nursing home directors told me about shaky hands.
• Draw with them, not for them: the thing most of us get backwards.
• Make something they can give away: painting door hangers with my mom, and handprint art that goes the other direction.
• Scale it up for birthdays and reunions: why 80th birthday parties keep ordering memory games.

How do you plan a Grandparents Day visit that doesn't just fizzle?

You bring the activity with you. That's the whole trick, and it takes about ten minutes of thinking ahead.

A visit where everyone sits and talks is lovely for about twenty minutes. After that, someone checks a phone, someone starts loading the dishwasher, and the afternoon quietly turns into logistics. But if there's something on the table that people can pick up and work on while they talk, the talking gets better, not worse. Hands busy, eyes down, stories out.

One Thanksgiving I brought tiny Christmas ornaments to my mother-in-law's and we painted them together. That's it. That was the plan. We took our time with the little brushes and talked our way through the afternoon, and what she painted was beautiful. We ended up with personal gifts to hand out at Christmas, plus an afternoon I still think about.

The activity doesn't have to be impressive. It has to exist before you walk in the door.

What's a good activity for grandparents with shaky hands or trouble drawing?

Reverse coloring, and I don't say that just because we sell it. I say it because the nursing home directors who buy from us keep telling me the same thing.

They call it a no-fail activity. The color is already on the page. You add lines, doodles, whatever you see in the shapes. There's no line to stay inside, nothing to get wrong, and nothing that exposes someone who hasn't drawn since grade school.

Here's the part that got me: several directors have told me that when residents with shaking hands do reverse coloring pages, the wobbly, detailed lines often make the finished piece more beautiful. Not a workaround. Better. They use it as a way to get people drawing again when picking up a pen feels like too much.

All it takes is a black pen each, and about five minutes before anyone stops worrying about how it looks.

The same goes for our Draw Their Faces animal crowd pages. The animals are already there, a whole crowd of them, and the only job is adding the faces. Nobody has to draw an animal from scratch, which is usually the part that makes people set the pen down.

A few ways to play it together:

• Take turns. One person draws a face, passes the page over, and the next person does the animal beside it. The page ends up looking like a conversation.
• Draw somebody. Give an animal the face of someone in the family and let everyone else guess who it is. Grandkids are merciless at this one, and grandparents usually win it.
• Call out a mood. Somebody says "suspicious" or "just heard good gossip," and everyone draws that face on their own animal at the same time. Compare when you're done.
• Name the crowd. Once the faces are finished, go back through and give each animal a name and a job. That's usually where the laughing starts.

Why should adults draw too, instead of just setting the kids up?

Because kids don't want an activity handed to them. They want you in it.

We've somehow decided that drawing and painting are for children, and that the grown-up job is supplying markers and saying "wow, buddy." I think that's backwards, and it's most of the reason this company exists.

When you sit down and draw badly next to a kid, something shifts. They see you try something you're not good at. They see you laugh at your own crooked dog. They see you willing to be a little goofy and a little vulnerable in front of them. That's what builds trust, and in my experience it's where the best memories come from. Not from the craft. From the fact that you did it too.

This goes double for grandparents, who often feel like their role at a gathering is to observe. Hand them a pen.

What can you make that turns into a gift?

Make something with a job to do afterward, because it gives the whole afternoon a point and gives everyone something to hand to someone else.

My mom and I painted door hangers one spring and gave them as Easter gifts. We had a genuinely fun afternoon, we walked away with a pile of presents we didn't have to shop for, and she made one for me that is hanging on my door right now. Every single day, that thing.

Gifts can run the other direction too, which is the part people forget. Older adults, especially anyone in assisted living, often feel like the giving only flows toward them now. The nursing home directors I talk to are actively looking for ways their residents can make something personal for their own families. Handprint art is made for this, and it works from either side of the table: kids can make a handprint flower for grandma or one of the five handprint designs for grandpa, and a grandparent's own handprint on a page is a keepsake nobody in that family is ever throwing away.

What works when it's a whole crowd, not just one visit?

Drawing games scale better than almost anything else at a big family gathering, because everyone can do them at their own pace.

We've had a steady stream of families order Memory Mix and the Birthday Edition minis for 80th birthday parties. Guests draw the cards, the guest of honor goes home with a playable deck about their own life, and the teenagers who arrived looking checked out end up drawing the most unhinged cards in the box.

Reunions work the same way. Grandparents, great-aunts, the uncle who claims he can't draw, everyone can manage a couple of cards, and nothing has to look good. If the gathering is a trip rather than a party, the Vacation Edition does the same job. Multi-gen beach weeks and cabin trips are exactly when everyone's together with time to fill, and you come home with a deck about that specific week instead of another 400 photos nobody looks at.

Frequently Asked Questions

When is Grandparents Day 2026?
National Grandparents Day is Sunday, September 13, 2026. It always falls on the first Sunday after Labor Day in the United States, so the date moves a little every year.

What's a good Grandparents Day activity for someone with arthritis or shaky hands?
Reverse coloring is the one I recommend first. The color is already on the page, so there's no line to follow and no way to ruin it, and the shakier lines often make the finished piece look better. Nursing home directors use it for exactly this reason. Here's how it works.

My parents insist they're "not creative." How do I get them to join in?
Don't ask them to be creative. Ask them to help you finish something. Pick an activity where the starting point is already there, sit down and do it badly yourself first, and don't make a ceremony out of it. Most people join in within about five minutes once nobody's watching them.

How do I keep teenagers at the table?
Give them something with a little edge to it. Teens go all in on drawing memory cards for a grandparent's birthday, especially when inside jokes are allowed. They'll also happily take the job of explaining the activity to everyone else, which gets them talking to relatives they'd otherwise avoid.

What do we do with what we made afterward?
Give it away or hang it up, ideally that same day. A door hanger on a door, an ornament on a tree, a handprint page in a frame, a memory deck in the drawer people actually open. The making is the point, but the keeping is what makes people do it again next year.

A Note from Janet

I started this company because of something I kept noticing: kids don't light up when you give them an activity, they light up when you do it with them. Same goes for our parents and grandparents, who get handed a lot of things to watch and not much to do.

The door hanger my mom painted is still on my door. She wasn't trying to make an heirloom. We were just sitting there together with paint, laughing at how mine turned out.

So this Grandparents Day, put one thing on the table and pull up a chair yourself. Print something, order something, or just grab a pen and a piece of paper. It counts either way.

Stay unchained — Janet 💖