Fern Michonski / Fern’s Music
Pre-School Music Education Expert: The Children’s Advocate for Love and Kindness, Inspiring Creativity and Joy.
January 16, 2013—Four Smart Ways to spend a Snow Day with Kids! 
This morning it is a winter wonderland outside the window. An overnight snow has blanketed everything from the bushes and trees to the streets. Schools are closed throughout the state and the children in every household are delighted. Once breakfast is served and the excitement wears down, every parent is faced with their children’s stare and the comment, “We’re bored. What can we do now?” Here are a few fun ideas you can pull out of your hat to keep the kids busy and happy on a long, cold snow day.
- Bring the snow inside. Dig out a few of your cake pans, go outside and fill the pans with snow. Bring the pans into the kitchen, put them on the table and let the kids make snow sculptures from the warmth of the kitchen. They can make mini snowmen, design roads and bridges, or simply make an art sculpture in their pan. If they choose to make a snowman, use raisins for eyes, a baby carrot for the nose and some nuts for buttons.
- Make Snowflakes. Bring out the white paper and scissors and start folding the paper into little squares and cutting small indentations into the folds. When you open up the folded square, you will have a beautiful snowflake. Once your children have made several, encourage them to decorate their rooms with the snowflakes. They could tape them on the windows or hang them from the ceiling. They could even create a scrapbook of all the different designs of snowflakes they have made.
- Make a tent. It is pretty unlikely you will be having company over when the streets are too slippery to drive on. So, on this special snow day, move a few chairs, take off the chair covers, arrange them around the room and then cover them with blankets. An instant tent has been created with crawl spaces and lots of fun for kids to play in. Hand them some flashlights and books and they will be busy for hours.
- Bake. Nothing is more pleasant than the smell of delicious food cooking in the kitchen on a cold winter’s day. Make your favorite sugar cookie recipe, roll out the dough and bring out the snowman and snowflake cookie cutters. If you don’t want to bake cookies, try making pudding. It’s quick and easy. Follow the recipe on the box. Once you have the pudding ready and it has cooled, divide the pudding into one cup portions and put each cup of pudding into large, Ziploc storage bags. Zip it closed and lay it flat on the table. Your children can then use their fingers and hands to draw designs in the pudding. When they are finished drawing in the pudding, open up the bags and eat it. If you have made vanilla pudding, you can add food coloring and turn your pudding into different colors to make this even more fun.
Enjoy your day together. Kids grow up all too fast and before you know it, snow days and little children will soon just be memories of happy times in the past.