Indoor Winter Activities

Since we're in the deep depths of winter - another all day snow storm today - we've been trying to find fun activities inside to keep Henry entertained with new things. The baby pool became a ball pit this Christmas, and we brought some of his outside toys inside like his crawling tube and riding toy. But, in search of new ideas, I made a sand tray and bowling for Henry.

I found some left over sand from an archeology activity with my 6th graders, and turned an old brownie pan into a sand tray. Henry explored the sand, but he doesn't love to get things on his hands, so he didn't really enjoy the sand sticking to his fingers. But, as always, he warmed up to it, and now asks to play with it almost every day.

Excited at the sand and bag!

Investigating the scooper

Bleck! Sand does not taste good!

We thought about building a sand box for Henry this summer, but since he didn't seem to love the texture of the sand tray, we're going to try out the beach and some friend's sand boxes first before committing. We'll see, he might grow into enjoying the sand more, after he realizes it's okay to have sand on your fingers, just don't eat it.

Henry loves to have a colored bathtub, so I combined two fun activities into one by filling water bottles and adding food coloring and letting him shake, shake, shake. He loves stirring and moving the water to mix the food coloring drops in the tub and in the bottle. We then turned the water bottles into bowling! I showed him how to knock the pins down with a ball, and he gets real close and throws/rolls the ball. He's still working on throwing skills, so this is a good game to encourage that. Until he figured out that it's more fun to just kick the bottles over!





Got any fun indoor games for us to play? I'm always looking for new ideas so please share! We've got to keep busy to distract us from the long winter until it warms up enough to play outside!