These activity ideas are designed for families with children under 8 to play, experiment & explore together during the holiday period.

You can download each of the resources as PDFs by clicking on the links below. Alternatively the same information from the resources can be found further down on this page.

Winter Treasure Hunt

How many of these things can you spot from the window or on a winter walk?

• People wearing winter clothes
• Icy puddles
• Fallen leaves or bare trees
• Fluffy clouds - is the weather dry, rainy or snowy?
• Wildlife or mini-beasts
• Lights or decorations
• Fallen leaves or bare trees

Play at Home Ideas

Indoor Treasure Hunt:

How quickly can you find these things at home?!

• 3 things that are your favourite colour
• Something shiny
• Something soft
• Something very small
• Something noisy

Box Challenge:

Reuse boxes and packaging with some junk modelling challenges.

Who can build the tallest, strongest tower?

Drawing Challenge:

Take turns thinking of an animal, a toy or object. Start drawing it. How quickly can your family guess what it is?

Smelly Socks:

Put some things that have a strong smell in separate clean socks e.g. lemon, orange, chocolate, mint.

Then guess what’s in the sock by smelling it!

Name it Game:

Take turns to see who can name 5 things that are: big, small, multicoloured, nice to smell, circular.

Can you think of more categories?

Ice Eggs

Get an adult to help you.

Freeze water in some yoghurt pots or small balloons with plastic toys inside Once frozen put in a tray and try to see how the ice melts to 'hatch' the toy.

How can you make the ice melt faster?

Our Playmaker's Winter Playdough Recipe

Ingredients:

• 128g Plain flour
• 64g table salt
• 2 tbsp or 41g cream of tartar
• 2 tbsp or 35ml vegetable oil
• 237 ml water
• Gel food colouring/s of your choice
• 1 tsp scents e.g. cinnamon, peppermint extract, orange extract

Equipment:

• Microwave
• Large microwave proof bowl
• Wooden spoon
• Table spoon
• Tea spoon
• Measuring jug

Instructions:

1. Put the plain flour, cream of tartar and salt in to the bowl and mix.
2. Put the water and vegetable oil together in the measuring jug.
3. Slowly mix the water and oil into the four mixture a little bit at a time to stop lumps forming in the batter.
4. Add your scent or spice of choice and mix.
5. Cook the mixture on full power for 3 minutes, stirring the mixture every minute. Be careful when doing this as the mixture will be hot.
6. Leave to cool for 15 minutes.
7. Knead in a little bit of gel food colouring at a time until your happy with the colour. If using several colours divide your dough before add the colours.

Ready, Steady, PLAY!

What will you create with your play dough? You could add other materials like leaves or pinecones, building bricks or paper straws? How could you add new textures?

Top Tip:

Top tip - store your dough in an airtight container in the fridge for up to a month!