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

Growing Up Ladybug and How to Become a Butterfly are both by Stepanka Sekaninova and illustrated by Linh Dao, and they came out at the same time and are on similar themes, so let’s look at them together.

Growing Up Ladybug is narrated by Mariella, a seven-spot ladybug. She talks about the parts of a ladybug, where they live, different kinds of ladybugs, why humans love them, their defenses against predators and the life cycle of a ladybug.

The drawings are cute if not always scientifically accurate, it’s not in such a way that’s likely to confuse kids (who probably already know that ladybug mamas don’t push their larval babies around in strollers, for instance.

It’s a good general description of the life cycle of a lady bug and why we like having them around.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Similarly, How to Become a Butterfly covers the life cycle of a butterfly, starting with caterpillars eating burning nettle leaves. (Here Amanda is the narrator.) The book talks about a few of the more than 18,000 daytime butterflies in the world as well as other creatures that live in the meadow (there’s that ladybug again, along with crickets, bees and other bugs).

It also covers some of the enemies of caterpillars like wasps and spiders, and the defenses that caterpillars use to try to prevent being eaten. It illustrates how caterpillars grow and change as they molt and prepare to pupate, and what a caterpillar looks like before and while it is forming its chrysalis. And while the book uses the word metamorphasis it doesn’t really talk about what happens between the caterpillar forming a chrysalis and the butterfly hatching.

This butterfly is a peacock butterfly, and once it hatches the book covers the parts of a butterfly and the life cycle. It also talks about nocturnal moths (though it says nocturnal butterflies are “usually called moths” when moths are actually a different species) and what butterflies do at night.

I’m maybe a little hard on this book because my daughter is a butterfly expert from way back, but it is still cute and good for the very basic basics of the butterfly life cycle.

Both books would be fun additions to your bookshelf for younger kids starting to learn about different animals or who have an interest in insects.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Have you read?

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