With chilly mornings and dark nights, winter means lots more time indoors for children and parents too. With the festive break just around the corner, it’s a great idea to take the opportunity for your kids to spend time inside enjoying some fun learning activities. Here’s some ideas to keep them busy over the next few weeks.
Reading
Reading is a wonderful activity that can be enjoyed all year round- especially during the winter months when there’s nothing better than being cosy enjoying a good book. Whether your children enjoy regular fiction or non-fiction books, picture books, magazines, graphic novels, recipes or blogs, encourage them to read what they enjoy the most. Any reading material is great for developing comprehension skills, building vocabulary, and supports writing abilities too.
Board Games
A great educational activity for your kids to indulge in during time spent inside in the winter months is playing board games. There’s so many to choose from that will help teach your child skills or test their knowledge. To help increase maths and critical thinking skills, we recommend card games or chess. Other board games such as Scrabble, Articulate, Scattegories and Boggle really put areas such as language and spelling to the test.
Get Crafty
Encourage your kids to take time this winter to enjoy being creative and express themselves through arts and crafts. Whether it’s drawing, painting, colouring-in, folding origami or making something abstract out of cardboard boxes and old milk bottles- it’s always a lot of fun and a great way to spend a rainy afternoon inside.
Video Games
We know how popular video games are with kids and even though they don’t have the best reputation, they can actually be a great learning opportunity. Even better there’s plenty of choice out there and most games will help improve attention and concentration, encourage reading, encourage problem solving, hand-eye coordination, enhance memory and improve leadership skills. For more information on how gaming can enhance children’s learning, check out this blog post.
Winter Baking
Getting in the kitchen with your kids is a wonderful way to make the most of indoor learning, especially when it comes to indulging in some baking some yummy winter recipes together. In fact, the learning opportunities in the kitchen are endless and you can cover everything from counting, measuring, reading recipes, fractions, conversions, and chemistry. We recommend baking some festive gingerbread men or a batch of mince pies for the whole family to enjoy!
Educational Documentaries
Why not cosy up and watch an educational documentary with your children this winter? Not only are there so many great documentaries for your kids to choose from covering topics like science, nature, space and different cultures, it’s also fun for the whole family. We’ve got a whole blog post dedicated to our favourite documentaries to watch here.
Get Building
Get involved in building, whether that’s with LEGO, wooden blocks, cardboard or even making a den in the lounge- they’re all great indoor STEM activities to keep children engaged this winter. Working with their hands to build something completely new is great for developing hand-eye coordination and also helps kids get a better understanding of weight, shape, angles and size and how it affects what they’re creating. Older children and teens may enjoy building things that are a little more intricate such as models, miniatures or perhaps a jigsaw puzzle with lots of pieces!
