5 super easy, fun & low maintenance activities for kids on those LONG winter days

It has been COLD here. Cold as in a high of negative 8. When it’s that cold we tend to stay inside, but it get’s pretty exhausting staying in the house all day with two little boys. On particularly cold & restless days inside I pull out these low-maintenance activities. They (and I) stay busy and stay pretty happy all day long.

Rubber band blocks

We have a lot of wood scraps in our garage and lots of hammers, nails and rubber bands. These are easy to make and always provide great entertainment. If you dare to let them make their own, that only adds to the fun (watch out for fingers). My boys could spend 10 minutes hammering on the each nail!

Snow cones

We have a lot of snow here in Montana. All we had to do was open our door and scoop up some clean snow. I don’t have any flavors, but I did have some Gatorade on hand. It worked great. The boys loved squeezing out the juice on their snow cones and eating it of course. We may have had seconds and thirds!!

Bubble wrap

  

Tis the season to get a lot of packages with lots of bubble wrap (right?!). I had just received a package and luckily it had some big bubble wrap sheets. They loved stomping on them and making them pop! If only I had a huge roll of it!! They even got their toy animals stomping on it too :)

Rice tubs

This is always a go to when the boys are needing something fun to do inside. They LOVE playing in the wheat/rice. It always makes a pretty good mess, but it’s an easy clean-up. Just a matter of sweeping the floor. Throw in spoons, cups, toys, anything that can be used as a mini shovel and mini bucket and they are quite content for a very long time.

Quiet boxes

We have a ton of big boxes that we keep in our crawl space (for some reason). So I pulled some out and threw in some crayons, makers, dot-a-dot stampers, snacks and the boys. They loved coloring to their hearts content and making as much of a mess as they wanted in the boxes.

K week

We made it to (& through) K week! We did Kiss, King, Kite, and Keys. I also planned Kitchen, but that day didn’t happen.

KISS – (1) We started with a big capital K and the boys traced it with their fingers. Then they added kiss stickers that I made. (2) We read Kisses by Nanda Roep and I printed out a sheet with all the different kinds of kisses in the book (Grandma kiss, butterfly kiss, circus kiss, etc). As I read the book, they kissed each of those pictures (with lipstick on of course!). (3) Christmas kiss ABC game combined with a Christmas kiss countdown (HERE). Little G matched the capital letter on the bottom of the kisses to the lowercase letters on the Christmas tree. We glued them down when he found a match and it became his countdown to Christmas! (4) Draw with the tip of the kiss, and then eat as many as you can before mom sees. (5) Later that night, for FHE, we made pretzel kiss treats.

KEYS – (1) Match the keys. I found a bunch of different types of key clipart. With the Silhouette, I traced them and made the “shadow” of the key, and cut the actual key clipart. They both have magnets on them, so they stick together when you match them. (2) At the Dollar Store I bought some locks with keys and they spent quite a while learning how to put the key in the lock, then turning the key and opening it. Little G found some things to lock up too! (3) Grant got some messed up keys from a store that makes keys (you could go anywhere – Wal-Mart, Home Depot, etc). They had a few that they were going to throw out so we snatched them! I buried them in some rice/wheat and the boys dug around until they found them and played for a while in the rice/wheat.

KITE – (1) This twistynoodle Kite page, with uppercase and lowercase K’s to trace. (2) We made some stained glass kites (inspired by THIS). (3) Kite pattern page. I colored the kites in a pattern and left the last couple blank and he filled them in. The very last line he did it all by himself! (4) count and glue bows. I made this page with numbers on the kites and that’s how many bows he glued on the string.

KING – (1) Decorate crowns! We used stickers, crayons and glued on some sequence. The blue and red crowns were from the dollar store and the yellow one was cut from cardstock (2 & 3) I made these King pages. There is a color by shape (I told him to color the kings in certain shapes a specific color), there is also a page with K’s to trace that are wearing crowns, and another page with lots of crowns to color. We didn’t get to that page, but I was going to tell him a number and he would count and color that many, and continue until they were all colored. 

K WEEK!

Rubber Band Blocks

A super easy and entertaining toy for the little ones. All you need is a piece of wood (scraps in our shop!), some finish nails, a hammer and some rubber bands.

  

It’s only a matter of nailing in all the nails, spread out enough that they can get rubber bands around a few of them at a time.

[already well used, as you can see from the juice stains]

You can also be brave and let your kids hammer for a while. My boys didn’t really hit them in, they just hit them. Good practice aiming

 

Super easy! And makes for hours of entertainment!

My boys love them. I might even need to make another one that is a little bit larger, they put so many rubber bands on them that they run out of room after a little while of playing with them!

These are especially perfect when the weather is less than par and we don’t want to go outside to play (like these days when it’s in the negatives with lots of ice and snow on the ground).

    {what you need}

block of wood
finish nails
hammer
rubber bands

Ornament & Christmas Card Tree display

This project is inspired by this ornament tree from Crate & Barrel. I changed up the design a bit, added some color and turned it into a Christmas card holder as well!

I started with a 2” thick piece of wood from this pile of lumber [milled by Grant]--

I used the table saw to cut 3/8” wide strips. If you don’t have an awesome husband like mine, that mills his own lumber, then you can get a 2” thick board or 2” wide molding or something similar.

 

I rigged up a little jig on the miter saw (aka chop saw) so that I could cut the crazy angles of the triangles. That only lasted for the first tree and it didn’t even work right. I probably could have spent some time and used my brain to do the math and figure out the actual angles, but I wasn’t up for that! The second tree I just laid the tree out, drew the angles and guessed on the cut. I’m precise like that , and it actually turned out a little better.

 

I drilled holes in the sides for the wire, then glued and stapled them together. I painted the big tree a light blue and the smaller tree a green with a little white over the top.

Next I stapled the small/green tree to the big/blue tree and sanded them to give them the rustic look. The tops of the trees weren’t very pretty, as in they didn’t match up like they should have had an engineer made them. So to cover that mistake up I added some hand cut stars that I drew up and nailed on. Can’t even tell how horribly I cut the angles!

 

Then I added the wire. I kept it simple by wrapping the extra wire around the back of the tree and then again around the wire itself. Nothin fancy.

 

Once the wire was on I used some E6000 and O rings (both can be found at Michaels, Joanns, or any other craft store). I had 11 small ornaments, so that is how many O rings I glued on randomly to the wires.

 

I added the little ornaments (from the Dollar Store and Wal-Mart) and mini clothes pins (at Wal-Mart) to hand up Christmas cards as we receive them.

  

    {what I used}

2” x 3/8” strips (length and amount depends on how big you want your trees)
Table Saw, Chop Saw, Scroll Saw
Wood glue, staples, 2 nails
Drill
Spray paint (colors you want the trees and stars – I used sky blue & green apple Rustoleum)
Sander (sand paper!)
Wire & wire cutters
E6000 and O rings
Little ornaments & mini clothes pins

 

FEATURED ON: