New Year’s Activities for Kids

My daughter is 14 and she’s never stayed up until midnight on New Year’s Eve. She finds it boring (and as a lover of sleep I can’t say I blame her!). But there are plenty of ways you can mark the new year with kids even if you don’t want to stay up all night. Check out these fun new year’s activities for kids.

Print and color party hats with these free printables from The Pragmatic Parent.

Rock Your Homeschool has five cute printable color by number coloring pages for New Year’s Eve, including fireworks, a clock, party hat, balloons and a ball to drop.

The printable playdough mats from A Little Pinch of Perfect let kids make a clock, decorate a party hat, color the fireworks and make a colorful ball to drop.

Play New Year’s bingo with printable cards from Mom Envy. Her set has 40 different cards so it’s perfect to do with a group or in a classroom if you’re in school this time of year (or as a fun activity for the first day after break).

Make some simple New Year’s Eve slime with confetti in it with this recipe from Little Bins for Little Hands. They also have a printable pack (free with email address) that includes bingo cards, a word search, sudoku, a printable for your word of the year and more.

You can make your own party crackers and fill them with confetti and treats with the printable template from Messy Little Monster. From the photos it looks like some of them have an old date but I’m not sure if they’ve been updated. You can always just use the ones that say Happy New Year without a year.

Help kids look back and ahead with a year in review printable. This one from Skip to My Lou has a space for a self portrait as well as writing some favorites for the year and things they want to learn, see and improve on in the new year.

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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