Surviving Winter Break at Home

Wondering what to do over winter break to keep your kids occupied and learning? As we approach winter break with our children, we know we will be mostly staying home. With everything going on in the world, we want to keep them as safe as possible. This means long days with no school to break up the at home dull drums. So what will we be doing?

We will find small ways to connect with friends, enjoy the outdoors, and get a bit of work done around the house. All while ensuring our kids keep reading and practicing skills necessary for school. Anything extra that you do is amazing and will support your learning so much!

Tips for Surviving Winter Break

The two weeks of winter break may seem long, especially if you aren’t traveling this year. However, with the holidays over the winter break and getting reading for the holidays, it really isn’t that long. Additionally, many families have new toys and gifts after Christmas to keep them occupied. But it still helps to have some ideas for those moments when you need a little more.

Getting your kids involved in the planning helps so much! We love to pass the responsibility for figuring out which ideas to try or places to go to our children. Not only will they enjoy the experience more, but it takes the pressure off the parents and teaches your children some amazing research skills too.

Social

1. Schedule some virtual play dates with friends. My kids love just going up their room and talking with their friends about anything. However, they could also play a board game together, try a free online escape room, do an art project together, or even play with similar toys.
2. Connect with family. This is the perfect time to have your kids help create a family photo, newsletter, movie or book to share with family and friends. First, let your kids figure out what to write, which pictures to use. Second, they decide who to send it too to bring some cheer. Additionally, they can even create it on their own devices too! What tech savvy kids we have these days.
3. Make cards for neighbors, friends, and family. We love to make physical holiday cards to drop off with friends and family nearby. This lets your kids get creative and connect with others. Plus you might just get to see your friends or family when you drop off the cards. Everyone loves to get mail, so this is a win for all.

Getting Out

1. Utilize your local library. Not only will we place an order for a few books to read over the winter break, but libraries also have video games, movies, and music. In addition, many times they have board games, different “new” toys, and theme bags too! We love to try out items from the library before we decide to buy. Most often after checking out an item from the library we see that it’s not something we really need, but on occasion our kids do fall in love with the item, so we add it to the birthday or holiday gift list.
2. Plan some outdoor time too! We are so blessed to have a wonderful backyard so our kids can play outside too. Trampolines are awesome, but so is just a yard with a field. Sports, relay races, yoga, building forts, playing in the snow (if you are so lucky), and small scavenger hunts.
3. Depending on weather and what you have nearby, you can also go on a bike ride, hike, or rollerskate around the neighborhood or local attraction. Moreover, you could also potentially go sledding or ice skating outdoors if you have the right weather conditions and small local places without too much crowding – but keep in mind that sometimes these are closed to the public due to the conditions.
4. If you haven’t discovered the fun of Geocaching, this is a great experience for your kids. It’s a little like a treasure hunt with secret codes. Just download the app and search for geocaches near your area or anywhere you are visiting. Then start your search for these hidden geocache boxes. If you are so inclined, you may even decide to make your own to add to the fun.

Fun at Home

1. Choose a dive deep project. Let your kids pick something they want to learn a lot about. Then help them to find resources to learn more. Books, magazines, online resources, virtual field trips or expert talks, etc. Read and learn together, be sure to ask questions and help your child connect information. Be sure to learn more about Reading Comprehension Strategies as you learn about a topic.
2. Bake and cook. Try some new family recipes or perfect the old. We love to let our kids use recipe books or search online to find new recipes to try out. Schedule a new cookie to make each day or build your dinner recipes up. Plus the kids always like the food better when they get to help.
3. Movie Marathon. Pick a fun movie topic to explore a new movie each day over the break. We love a good Christmas or winter movie theme, but also find that Avengers or Disney Princesses can work well too. A Toy Story movie marathon can be quite fun too. And if you want, you can always go more abstract and ask your children to do some research to justify their movie pick. We love using a theme like wants vs needs, early world history, or nature to guide our children to a great movie marathon.
4. Try out a board game challenge. Pick a favorite board game to play twice each day. Play once for learning, then share any strategies, key take aways, or ideas. Play the board game a second time later in the day and try something new. See how it works and try to figure out why. Learn why we love Playing Board Games so much.

Winter Break Crafts

1. Get crafty. There are so many winter crafts that you can make with your children. We love making snow in doors, creating decorations, and new blankets. The tie blankets and pillows are super easy and something we love to make. In addition, it gives us something new to enjoy next year. Schedule a craft or recipe for each day over the break, or if you are like us, each day up to Christmas when they suddenly have a whole bunch of new things to do. You can even put your kids to the test by letting them find the crafts or directions to try online or in a book. Mine always love when we do something they pick out.
2. Create a felt board. We love these! I use a large piece of blue and green fleece for the background. Add to any wall or exposed back of a tall dresser or even the side of a bunk bed. Then use different color felt to create scenes with your children. We created a gingerbread to decorate and a Christmas tree. You can find lots of premade figures too! We have a Mickey Mouse set, Disney Princess set, Frozen set, and trucks set too.
3. Outdoor decorations. We love to create a new decoration for our front door or garage door. Clear contact paper let’s us laminate our paper decorations so they withstand the winter weather. We let our children search online for a creative idea and then help them with the implementation. Other great places to decorate include windows, decks, and fences. We love to decorate our windows with sun catchers made with the clear contact paper too. Decks and fences are great places for lights or larger cut outs, which can be fun. We love tracing our kids for these!

Declutter

1. Organize and declutter. With the holidays, there are usually new gifts to find homes. To make room for all their new gear, clothes, toys, books, etc, they might just need to find new homes for some of their old things. Take a little bit of time each day to find items to donate to others in need or pack away for a younger sibling. This is the perfect time to go through their clothes to see what still fits. I love to give my kids a box each. They put any clothes that doesn’t fit into the box and I can go through the box when I have time to pack, donate, discard. We do the same with toys!
2. BONUS – get the kids cleaning! When was the last time your baseboards or ceiling fans were dusted, windows and doors plus handles washed, walls scrubbed? Well, get the kids involved cleaning these up. Mine don’t mind a few minutes of “strange” – once in a while – chores. Plus they love climbing into strange places – behind the couch, up on a stool, or in little nooks and crannies to scrub something hidden.
3. Take a few moments one day to go through their sports and school bags. We pull out old gear and see what fits, what needs to be replaced, and what can be passed to a younger sibling. This is especially great with the holidays coming up for quick and easy gift ideas. Then clean out school bags. You may find your little one is carry way more than they need or is missing some essential supplies. Restock and replenish where needed.

Quick Games

Have a variety of short no nonsense games for small moments. These are great for the moments when you need a little something to occupy your children but are too busy for much more. We love these during meal preparation, when driving, or even just while waiting for our next fun project.

We love picking a category and trying to name an item in the category for each letter of the alphabet. This activity will help to grow your child’s vocabulary and assists with alphabetical order. We especially love using this game when we are practicing learning in Spanish.

We play simple math games where we pick a number and keep doubling it over and over until we get stuck. This is great for growing your child’s number sense and flexibility with numbers.

Follow the leader and Simon Says work magic too! Both of these games are amazing at helping to build self control and listening skills. We love to throw in a twist by giving two or three part directions or whispering our directions.

Add in some exercises. We keep a quick kid’s exercise list of short little exercises kids can do for about one minute. These are great for getting them to give you that extra minute you need, plus they are getting stronger. We love jumping jacks, inch worms, duck walks, push ups, wall sits, and burpees in our home.

Connect with Us for More Kid Friendly Tips

If you are a dual language family, read our post on Dual Language Winter Break. For our dual language families, definitely don’t miss our Parent’s Guide for Reading in Spanish. We have so many amazing tips for our Dual Language families to help their children with language development. We suggest starting with Increasing your Child’s Dual Language Vocabulary.

Looking for tips to help your kids learn to clean their room? Winter break is the perfect time to train a new habit with our 7 Tips to a Clean Room post. And with the holiday’s coming up, don’t miss out on Christmas with Infants and Toddlers as well as Celebrating New Year’s Eve with Kids.

Like our tips for surviving winter break, leave us a comment below. Have other tips, let us know too! Let us know how you enjoy spending your winter break. Want more inspiration and some down for you ideas, subscribe to our newsletter below. We love to send our CreatingButterflies subscribers practical solutions you can use right now and some downloadable freebies from time to time.

Hi, I’m Nicole.

Here at Creatingbutterflies we provide families with practical solutions to real life problems for everything parenting, scouting, dual language, and enjoying time outdoors. We are a family of 6 with 4 wonderful becoming bilingual children who loves scouting, camping, and hiking with their family. Mom is an educator and dad is a firefighter/paramedic.