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Another Snow Day? Try These Tips to Keep Your Kids (and You!) Happy

Don't dread a snow day, embrace it with one of these fun ideas.

Whether the weather occurs in December or March (or even April some years!), snow days always start off with some level of excitement but often devolve into complaints of boredom, especially if you have two in a row! If you’ve had it with winter and are dreading another day stuck inside, try these ideas to make it manageable — and even fun!

 

Before you begin, though, embrace the situation. If you turn your dread into happy anticipation, your attitude will determine the whole mood in your house. Get your kids involved in making a list of fun things to do during the snow day, and gather up your supplies tonight.

 

Board Game Marathon

One thing you’ll have a lot of is time. So, drag out the board games — like Monopoly — that take a long time, and enjoy actually finishing a game for once. If your kids lose interest, leave it set up and come back to it later in the day. Or, create a board game tournament: choose a few games and play head to head, with the winners facing off in a new game in the next round.

 

Bathroom Art and Spa

Take your art studio into the bathroom, and then wash it all away when the kids are done. Tape paper to the bathtub walls and let your artists paint and drip as much as they’d like. Include spray bottles with water or diluted paint to add to the fun. Or do some shaving cream prints: squirt shaving cream into a baking dish, swirl in some paint, and then gently lay paper on top to create a print.  

 

When you’re done, rinse everything away and then set up a spa for the kids! Use bubble bath, a homemade face mask (find a good recipe here), cucumber eye covers, or brown sugar face scrub (brown sugar, olive oil, and honey).

 

Obstacle Course

Challenge the kids to create an obstacle course inside. They may need some suggestions to get their creativity flowing: what could you jump over? What could tricks do you need to stop to do (like hop on one foot or build a block tower)? What different ways could you move through the course? Once they’ve set up their course, they can time each other going through it forwards and backwards.

 

Play With Your Food

Involve your kids in making some fun foods over the course of the day: Jell-O Jigglers to cut with cookie cutters, a snack of pretzel sticks and marshmallows that they can use to build towers before eating, snow ice cream, or a meal that is disguised as a lot of snacks (cheese and crackers, cut up fruit, salami, veggies and dip or hummus all on a big tray that everyone can snack from until they are full.)

 

Snow Party

There are many party games that require few or no supplies, and you probably don’t play them much. A snow day is a great day to try them! Give some old classics like Freeze Dance, Charades, Win, Lose or Draw, Guess Who, and Musical Chairs a whirl.

 

Science

Try making snow using ingredients you’ll have on hand. White hair conditioner and baking soda, shaving cream and cornstarch, and cornstarch and white lotion all make snowy substances.  (Recipes here.) If you have many ingredients, try them all and compare! 

 

A potion-making station can entertain kids for a good long time. Give kids baking soda, a small pitcher of vinegar, shaving cream, food coloring and glitter — if you dare — along with some small jars with lids. Tell them to put baking soda in the bottom, and then any combination of other ingredients, and then pour vinegar on top to see it fizz. Once each mixture fizzes, the fun isn’t over! Shake up the container and add more ingredients, then make it fizz again.

 

Now go enjoy your day off! And show us your success stories by tagging us on Instagram with #BucksCounty Parent!

 

Photo by Yan Krukau

Contributing writer.

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