Long, cold winter days can make many people go stir crazy, and kids are no exception. In early winter, help your kids pass the time productively by preparing for Christmas. After the excitement from the holidays dies down, offer some new winter activities to keep them occupied until spring. For very cold or snowy days, indoor activities are on the agenda. If you live in an area with snow, venture outside for activities when the weather is tolerable. Plan age-appropriate activities for younger kids, older kids and tweens.
Younger Kids: Indoors
Before Christmas, get in the holiday spirit with crafts and activities toddlers and young children can do with an adult's help. Cut snowflakes from folded printer paper; bake cookies and decorate them; and make Christmas cards with pictures of the kids attached by glue stick. Print Christmas-themed coloring-book pages, available free on the Internet, and have a coloring contest. Make snowmen with three circles of white paper and decorate them with embellishments from around the house, such as markers, crayons, colored paper, glitter, colored glue, stickers or cotton balls. Make an edible snowman out of marshmallows stuck together with frosting and decorated with candy sprinkles.
After Christmas, keep the kids busy with a picnic-style lunch in front of your fireplace and a fort made out of blankets and clothespins. Record each other singing using your computer's microphone, and have fun playing the voices back. Play the "cat and mouse" version of hide-and-seek and have the mice hide from the cat. Put finger paint on a paper plate and let kids make and decorate their hand prints for display.
Younger Kids: Outdoors
Before Christmas, take the tots outside to make snow angels. Gather branches and pine cones to make an aromatic centerpiece decorated with red ribbon and Christmas ornaments. Go Christmas caroling around your neighborhood, and deliver decorated cookies to neighbors and friends.
After Christmas, if the weather is amenable, go outside and throw snowballs into a hula hoop target on the ground, or spray paint the snow with colored water in a spray bottle. Find out what happens to bubbles when you blow them outside -- only try this for a few minutes -- on a day when the temperature is 0 degrees Fahrenheit or colder. Hide small toys around the yard and have a scavenger hunt in the snow. Feed the birds by hanging a pine cone coated with peanut butter and rolled in birdseed from a tree.
Older Kids: Indoors
Older kids and tweens can do more involved or lengthy activities during the winter. Before Christmas, make holiday French toast by substituting eggnog for the milk. Make a sled out of candy cane runners and a candy bar covered in wrapping paper for the sled's body. Create snowflake window clings by placing wax paper over a snowflake template and painting it with white glitter dimensional fabric paint. Let the paint dry overnight, then peel and stick the snowflakes to windows. Change things up by designing handmade New Year's cards instead of Christmas cards.
After Christmas, work on crafts. Cover a small cardboard box with decoupage;, tie dye T-shirts; make a scrapbook of photos from the summer; decorate spiral notebooks with beads and rhinestones. Teach kids how to knit or crochet, and make a "community scarf" that everyone works on.
Older Kids: Outdoors
When winter is new and the holidays are before you, take advantage of the excitement of first snows by building crazy headless snowmen, making a tree shape out of snow and decorating it with Christmas lights and wrapping the outside frames of the kids' bedroom windows with Christmas lights. Build a snow fort -- do not make the roof too thick or it could collapse -- then have a good, old-fashioned snowball fight before going in and having hot chocolate by the Christmas tree.
After Christmas, bring some color to the winter by making an ice sun catcher. Freeze several colors of water in ice cube trays, then put the colored cubes in a round cake pan filled with water. Place a small cup full of water about an inch from one side of the pan; this will create a hole to thread a hanging ribbon through. Freeze the cake pan, run it under warm water until the ice pops out, and hang the sun catchers by their ribbons on tree branches around the yard. Make an obstacle course and time each other as you run through the course. Spray the snow with colored water to mark the course, and add "obstacles" like a barrel to jump over, a hanging hula hoop target to throw a snowball through, pine cones in a line to run slalom-style through and a flag hanging from a branch that the runner must grab and hold as she runs across the finish line.
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