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Activities to Maintain Snow Day Sanity
An unplanned day at home can be an inconvenience for your schedule or your employer, but it is also an excellent opportunity to make memories at home with your children. Embrace the joy of a snow day and keep the little ones busy and content with some fun activities.
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If you live in an area that enjoys long winter months, you are probably familiar with the radio announcer saying: “School and all school activities are canceled due to inclement weather.”
An unplanned day at home can be an inconvenience for your schedule or your employer, but it is also an excellent opportunity to make memories at home with your children. Embrace the joy of a snow day and keep the little ones busy and content with some fun activities.
Bring the outside indoors
Weather permitting, bundle everybody up and start your day with a trip outside. There’s plenty to do out there in the fresh, cold air—snow angels, sledding and snowballs, to name a few. Having fun outside is a no-brainer. It’s staying inside on this day that requires real thought and imagination.
So, before the kids come in from playing outside, have them collect a bucket of snow—enough to make great art and ice cream. While they’re at it, you can gather up the items needed to get ready for some good, old-fashioned fort-building.
Melting Snow Art
“This fun melting snow process art project brings the fun of winter indoors and creates an abstract masterpiece that your kids will have a blast making,” says Erica Cardinal in her blog East TN Family Fun (Mom Explores The Smokies).
All you need is; snow, white construction paper, liquid food coloring, art tray, and a hairdryer.
Place the construction paper in the center of the tray and, using different colors of food coloring, have your kids create a random pattern on the paper. Then, have them scatter a handful of snow over the surface of the page. Finally, melt and dry the snow with a blow dryer.
There are lots of creative opportunities here to make it unique using shapes, colors, and even some science– from the size of the color drops to the way you aim the dryer.
Snow Cream
Use clean snow to make ice cream. This simple, tasty recipe calls for 1/3 cup of sugar, one teaspoon vanilla, one cup milk, and 8-10 cups of clean snow. Mix it all up, add some sprinkles or chocolate chips on top, and dig in!
Fort-building
Fort-building is a great (and fun) way to help kids learn problem-solving, creative thinking, and cooperation. And what kid–or adult– doesn’t love a fort? With a minimal amount of supervision, your kids can spend the afternoon building and spending time in one.
Begin by helping them pick a building location and supply the materials (two chairs for the base of the fort, one bedsheet for the roof, sofa cushions for the walls additional pillows for making it comfortable inside). Let them use their imaginations to make it their own!
A fort is also an exciting place for kids to entertain themselves with board games, books, videos, or drink cocoa.