Winter months can be a special time for families and offer unique opportunities for bonding, creativity, and relaxation, but they can also be a challenge. Schools close for winter breaks, and the kids are home and ready to play. At the same time, the weather is often cold and dreary, keeping you and your family inside more than they typically are.
If you want to keep your kids happy through the winter months and avoid cabin fever, you’ll want to be prepared with as many fun indoor activities as you can manage. These engaging and entertaining activities will help you keep boredom at bay until spring returns.
1) Tag Team An Art Collaboration
Drawing and coloring aren’t only fun activities; they’re also great ways to practice coordination and stretch our creative muscles. Sitting down to draw and color something is a great way to spend an afternoon, and you can make things more exciting by collaborating together.
Sit down and draw something with your child or children, then swap your drawings and color them in. In the end, you’ll have two or more new pieces of art that you created together. Drawing and coloring times are also great opportunities for quiet conversation.
2) Balloon Volleyball
Balloon volleyball is a low-cost, high-energy game that’s fun for kids of all ages. A few balloons can turn your living room into a hub of creative, energetic fun that can entertain kids for hours. The goal is to hit the balloon up into the air and not let it touch the floor. Count the number of hits before the balloon touches the ground, and keep the game going by having your child beat their previous count. If you want to add an extra layer of excitement, add a twist on the classic “The Floor is Lava” game, where the goal is to move across the room without touching the floor (“lava”) while also keeping the balloon in the air.
3) Board Games and Card Games
Board games were invented to cure indoor boredom. Some board games last as little as 20 minutes, while others can stretch on for hours or days. The best board games, of course, are the ones you already have, but it’s worth talking with your child about the sorts of games they like. Let them choose the game and even direct play.
Card games are also a classic option with endless versatility. While most board games are designed for a specific type of gameplay, a single deck of cards can become dozens of different games.
4) Homemade Clay Sculptures
There’s nothing quite like using your hands to make something. You should be able to find clay at any craft store and even many grocery and department stores, but it’s more fun to make it yourself. Combining common household ingredients like baking soda, cornstarch, and water will create a dough that can be molded and hardened into anything you can imagine. You can even add food coloring to the “clay” or paint it with acrylic paint once your creations have dried.
5) Snow Painting
If you can’t take your kids to the snow, you can always bring the snow to them with an artistic twist. Snow painting is a fun and creative way to bring a little bit of winter inside to play with. You will need something to hold snow; a plastic storage bin is ideal, but a cookie sheet will work in a pinch. You’ll also need paintbrushes, bowls or cups, and food coloring.
Fill your bin or cookie sheet with snow and bring it inside. If you’re concerned about the mess, lay down some towels to keep water off the floor. Fill your bowls or cups with water and mix in food coloring to create water-based paints. Place the paints in the bin with the snow and let your little ones create their own temporary abstract paintings.
6) Puzzles, Brick Sets, And Models
Often, kids like to run around with no plan or direction, following the fun wherever it leads. Other times, they want a more structured activity with a clear objective. Jigsaw puzzles, brick sets, model kits, and similar activities offer clear guardrails while still being fun.
They help kids learn to problem solve, follow instructions, and see large jobs through to completion, one step at a time. They are also the sorts of activities you can do together or alone, and you can chip away at them a little at a time, taking breaks whenever you’ve had enough.
7) Do A Science Experiment
Just because you’re stuck inside doesn’t mean there’s no room for wonder. Break out the lab coats and safety goggles, lay down some towels to contain the mess, and get ready for some mad science. Grown an avocado from a pit, mix baking soda and vinegar for an at-home volcanic flow, fill glasses with different levels of water and listen to the notes they produce, make elephant toothpaste or oobleck, see who can fold the best paper airplane, or find your own ways to explore the natural world from the comfort of your home.
8) Bake Some Treats
The only thing better than a fun activity is one that you get to eat at the end. Let your kiddo choose what to make and help with the preparation. Most kids are more than happy to plunge their fingers into sticky dough and roll it around.
Make some bread, bake some cookies or brownies, and let your children pick the mixins. Explain what happens when you mix warm water, sugar, and yeast together. Or explain what happens when the treats go in the oven, transforming from sticky dough or batter into warm and gooey desserts. Baking is a fun, educational, and tasty activity all rolled into one.
9) Plant An Indoor Garden
In the summer, gardening is a great way to get some sunshine, use your hands, and help something to grow. That’s a little harder to do in the winter, but it’s still possible. All you have to do is bring the plants inside with you.
If you have a well-lit window, many plants will be perfectly happy there over the winter months. Others may need some supplemental light to keep them happy. Starter plants offer more immediate results, but sprouting from seed can be an exciting activity all on its own, and your child will have the joy of seeing their plant grow from the very beginning. An indoor garden will keep you busy throughout the winter as you and your little ones water and care for your plants until spring arrives.
10) Make A Time Capsule
You will need a container. An old coffee tin, a shoebox, or anything in between will do. It doesn’t really matter as long as it can hold things close. Choose the things you want to enclose, being careful not to lock away anything your child might miss.
You can go broad, selecting things without any particular them, or you can be more specific. Maybe you choose things from your summer vacation or the previous school year. Place your items inside, seal the container, and decorate it. Finally, select a location for the capsule to wait. You could bury it in the yard or tuck it into a closet with a note that you should not open it until a specified date.
11) Read a Book Together
Books have been a favored pastime for hundreds of years, and for good reason. A good book can transport you from your living room to a faraway land filled with adventure. If your child is old enough, take turns reading one after another. A good book can last days, weeks, or longer, giving you and your child something to look forward to every day. And the best part is that once you’ve finished one book, there are millions more to choose from.
12) Have an Indoor “Snowball” Fight
Crumpled-up paper and a little imagination can provide all the fun of an actual snowball fight without the icy sting of the real thing. All you need is some scrap paper and room to run around. Any scrap paper will do, even old newspapers or junk mail, but clean white paper makes for the most authentic fake snowballs.
Scrunch the paper into balls with your hands. Little kids get a kick out of this step, so don’t hesitate to let them help! Once you’ve formed enough paper snowballs, it’s time for the battle to begin. Break into teams, define rules, and keep score or have an all-out battle with every person for themselves. When you’re finished, remember to recycle the paper or save it for other crafts.
13) Start a Family Podcast
All you need to start a podcast is something to talk about and a way to record your conversation. Making a podcast with your kiddos can help little ones learn language skills while helping older kids practice public speaking and storytelling. If your kids are interested in technology, let them help with the recording and editing process.
A podcast provides built-in conversation time, and the recordings will act as an audio scrapbook to preserve those memories for the future. You can keep your podcast “episodes” private or share them with family and friends. If you want to go all in, there are plenty of podcasting kits on the market, but you don’t have to spend money to get started. A smartphone app or tape recorder can work just as well.
14) Make a Sensory Bin
Sensory bins are a fantastic hands-on activity that engages a child’s senses while encouraging exploration, creativity, and learning. Start by choosing a large, shallow container or plastic bin. Fill it with a base material that is safe to touch and easy to clean, such as uncooked rice, dried pasta, kinetic sand, water beads, or even cotton balls for a wintery theme. Add small toys, figurines, animals, or alphabet letters, and use spoons, small shovels, toy trucks, or diggers to find the items.
15) Create Homemade Snowglobes
Snowglobes are a fun way to bring a small piece of winter wonderland into your home. Making snowglobes will fill an afternoon, but you can enjoy them for the rest of the holiday season. You will need a small glass jar, a small toy or other scene decorations, optional glycerin, glitter, water, and hot glue.
If you don’t already have anything to put inside your globe, you can make figures and decorations out of clay (more on that below). Place glue on the jar’s lid and fix your figure/decorations in place. You might want to lightly sand the inside of the lid first to give the glue a good surface. Fill the jar with cold water, add a couple of teaspoons of glitter (follow your heart), and add a few drops of glycerin to help suspend the glitter. Screw the lid in place and glue it closed. You can also paint the lid to give your creations some extra flair.
