Fun Winter Printables and Games to Keep Kids Entertained

Winter break is a great break from our everyday routines, but it can be tricky to keep the kids entertained because it’s generally not the best weather. On the rare occasions we get snow it’s usually awfully cold, so my kiddo would only want to play outside for a few minutes. If you need some indoor entertainment for holiday break or any other time when it’s cold, check out these winter themed printables.

Keeper of Our Home has a few cute and easy printable mazes that little kids can do. There’s the snowflake pictured as well as a letter W, a penguin trying to get to an igloo and get to the snowman through the maze while counting by 2s.

I’m always down for a good I-Spy printable, especially when it gives you the chance to color all the little objects, like you could with this one form Paper Trail Design. Kids can color the page and count up all the snowmen, snow globes, mugs of hot chocolate, clouds and more.

You’ll find a nice collection of coloring pages and winter printable activities at Sunny Day Family. This collection includes coloring pages of kids in the snow, a snow globe you can fill with drawings, a printable winter memory game, a sled-themed maze, word search and more. You can get the printables when you sign up to receive emails.

Playing with Legos is a fun thing to do when it’s cold outside, and Life Over Cs has a nice collection of printable Lego mats kids can use to build different designs and then count up how many bricks of each color they used. Options include a penguin, snowman, snowflake, mitten, cup of cocoa and more.

Give kids a little challenge with this fun decoder wheel activity from Crafting Cheerfully. This project is for sale in her Etsy shop but would be lots of fun for kids who like mysteries. It includes riddles kids can solve with the decoder, but of course they could also draw the icons and send their own secret messages.

Print out a game you can be playing in minutes with this wintry take on chutes/snakes and ladders from Love to Play. It’s easy enough for little ones and a pretty quick game so older kids won’t get bored that fast playing with the little kids! Check out the kids craft section on Craftbits.com

If it’s hot where you live, you might be looking for some fun activities you can do with kids inside the house. And while bubbles are generally a strictly outside the house kid of activity, these special bubbles are ones you can play with inside. It’s both a lot of fun and a science lesson.

These bubbles aren’t blown into the air, you blow them onto a tabletop gently through a straw.

What’s really cool about them is that they will stay on the table top without popping. You can even blow another bubble inside the first bubble, or stack bubbles on top of each other.

Why does this work? It’s thanks to a special ingredient in the bubble solution: sugar.

This particular recipe is from Play Party Game, but I’m sure you can find it other places with similar ingredients as well. But this post has a good explanation for what is normally happening with regular bubble solution made mostly with just soap and water, as well as why the sugar helps to make bubbles stronger and helps them last longer.

You could make this into a full on science experiment for your kids, comparing regular bubbles (this time you’ll want to do it outside or somewhere easy to clean) to the “unbreakable” bubbles, letting them hypothesize about what ingredients might help make bubbles stronger or what the sugar does to the solution.

You can talk about the molecular structure of the bubble being altered by the sugar, which makes it stronger and longer lasting.

They even have an activity kit you can buy to help guide your explorations and that offers extension activities for you to try.

Or you could just play with them. No judgement here; it’s summertime.

Grab the recipe and more of the science behind the bubbles from Play Party Game. And while you’re playing with bubbles you can also check out my giant bubble solution recipe over at Our Daily Craft.

[Photo: Play Party Game]

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