60 winter indoor and outdoor activities
Loads of ideas to fill winter days with tons of creative indoor and outdoor fun!
Outdoor fun
• Have a snowman challenge with your neighbours! Give out prizes for Most Creative and Best-looking.
• Devote an entire day to doing good deeds. Walk around your ’hood with trash bags and pick up litter, volunteer to walk dogs at your local animal shelter or shovel an elderly neighbour’s front walk!
• If your city allows it, set up a backyard fire pit and have a winter campfire, complete with s’mores and scary stories.
• Go on a winter hike in a park or woods. Collect items you find and glue them to sturdy paper to make a beautiful nature collage. Or, take some beautiful snowy pictures.
• Add a snowy twist to your favourite game or sport — ever tried snow soccer or snow football?
• Beat the blahs by hosting your own Olympic Winter Games!
• Go skating, or teach the kids to skate!
• Look up local outdoor arenas or safe ponds and take part in a Canadian tradition: hockey.
Cooking with kids
• After hockey have a hot chocolate sampling party. Invite friends over to try dark, peppermint or white hot chocolate. Get creative with whipped cream and sprinkles. Adults can add some secret Bailey’s....
• Or keep it simple by baking a batch of yummy Chocolate Chip Cookies.
• Make one of our classic breakfast recipes.
• Treat the kids to a Banana Split Pizza.
• Go to a farmer's market.
• Make a meal together with some of the items you buy at the market.
• Perhaps include our Whole Wheat Tortilla and Cheddar Quesadilla Wedges.
• You could also give our Banana Bread a try!
• Throw a fondue party! Stuff yourselves with cut fruit dipped in melted chocolate and bread cubes dipped in melted cheese!
• Order some Chinese food for dinner, but make your own Fortune Cookies.
Crafts
• Want to do something a little more hands-on? Make puppets!
• Already have a bunch of puppets? Then give them a home! Upcycle an old box and make your own puppet theatre. Spend the afternoon decorating it with supplies from the dollar store and recycling bin.
• Make a craft with some of our classic craft recipes.
• Draw and cut out silhouettes of family members’ profiles.
• Cut out a bunch of pictures from magazines and make a collage.
• Make a puzzle! Buy puzzle templates from an arts and crafts store; everyone makes a puzzle and then passes the pieces off for someone else to assemble.
• Create a playset for action figures. Turn recyclable cardboard into playsets, like houses, spaceships, et cetera, by painting, building little decorations (magazine clippings for small paintings, tin foil for mirrors). If you have a skilled electrician on hand, add energy-efficient LED christmas lights for effect.
• Teach your kids to sew or knit something cool, like a pillow cover, plush toy or scarf.
• Make your own colouring book! Everyone can contribute a drawing and colour in each other’s artwork.
• Make a simple homemade bird feeder using pine cones, peanut butter, birdseed and a bit of string, then hang them up and spend a lazy afternoon birdwatching.
Movies: Watch 'em or make 'em!
• Nostalgia Movie Marathon. Rent your fave movies from your childhood, such as Annie, Mary Poppins or Ghostbusters, and watch them again with your kids.
• Another option is to have an Everyone’s Favourite Movie Marathon. Each member of the family selects their favourite (PG-appropriate) movie to watch in a day-long marathon.
• Make some short movies using your smartphone or a Flip-style camera.
• Make a stop-motion video. Use toys, Lego, et cetera, as the characters in your movie. Take one photo at a time with any simple digital camera. Import your photos into a simple movie maker and shorten photo duration to one second or one frame. Add voiceover and music, and you’re done!
Read on for tons of fun indoor adventures >
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What do you think?
Christa18 says ....
I had to laugh when I read one suggestion......"go to a farmer's market"! Where are your winters? With love from Winnipeg