Recreation

Winter is for Families: 7 Creative Activites

1. Build a miniature snow city. It’s like making a sand castle, but much more durable and long lasting. Use a metal spatula to smooth walls. Spoons help scrape out doors and windows. Use some food coloring to add life to your white village. You could make any sort of dwelling, from a ski resort complete with chair lifts and skiers to a snow village with little snowmen and ice skating ponds. Let your children stretch their imaginations. Don’t forget to snap a photo when you are finished.

2. Paint a snow picture. When your yard is covered with a fresh sheet of white snow, fill water bottles or squirt guns with water and food coloring. Then let your kids make some wild snow pictures.

3. Icy Legos. Using Jell-O molds, yogurt containers, muffin tins, ice cub trays, etc, freeze a bunch of different-colored water outside or in a freezer. Bring all the frozen blocks outside and have your kids build things with them. A bit of water will help frozen ice parts stick to one another.

4. Fun photo opp! Before adding the head of your snowman, let the kids take turns mugging as Frosty, corncob pipe and all.

5. Why do Christmas trees have to be inside and only during Christmas season? Jazz up bare trees with colorful streamers and homemade ornaments.

6. Snow candles. Get your hands on a bunch of old candles or crayons. Then, melt them down in an old pan or jar that you don’t care about semi-ruining. Next, find some wicks, or something you could use as one. Now, go outside and create a mold in the snow by packing it into a crazy shape, making sure to get it really packed tight, then carefully pour in the wax followed by the wick. It should harden up quickly, leaving you with a brand new candle recycled from old ones.

7. Ice-o-Lanterns. There are several ways to do this project, but it fundamentally boils down to creating a hollow space in the middle of a large chunk of ice. Use anything from a tin can to a five gallon bucket to create a large block of ice, and melt the middle after it has frozen to create a cavern. Then flip it over onto a lit candle and it will create a decorative winter glowing contraption.