January brings a new year, and a fresh start – making it a great month to refresh your curriculum. Even though these months are cold, we can introduce the winter weather to our classrooms with activities that encourage young children to explore the colors, shapes, and textures of the winter season. In this article, we share a variety of winter-themed activities for young children to enjoy, organized by age so that little learners from infancy to pre-k can enjoy this chilly season!
Activities that include unique colors, shapes, and textures are ideal for infants and toddlers, who love to use their senses to explore and learn. These winter-themed sensory activities will be especially fun for the littlest learners in your classroom!
Taste-safe Hot Chocolate Playdough:
Using only a few ingredients, you can create a sensory experience with playdough that smells like a warm cup of hot chocolate! You’ll need just a few ingredients: hot chocolate mix, flour, salt, baking soda, and cooking oil. You might even invite little ones to help you create the playdough by mixing everything together!
Discovery bottles are a fun and mess-free activity for little ones. To make winter discovery bottles, collect winter-themed items such as pretend snowflakes, glitter, pom-poms, and fake snow and place them all into recycled plastic bottles. Then, invite the children to shake the bottles and watch the swirling colors and shapes!
This simple playdough recipe requires just three ingredients: corn starch, flour, and vegetable oil, to make a taste-safe winter-themed sensory activity for the little ones in your care. Set the playdough in a large bin along with items for scooping and pouring. You might even add a few pretend snow-dwelling animals, such as polar bears or penguins!
Process art activities invite children to engage in creative projects that encourage free expression, rather than on a goal or end-result. Following are a couple of wintery art projects for the infants and toddlers in your care to enjoy!
This simple collage invites young children to explore different colors and textures as they create a unique and shiny display – using tin foil, white glue, shaving cream, and scraps of white, blue and silver tissue paper.
This clever, icy art activity uses small plastic penguins and ice cubes to create a colorful painted scene. Place liquid watercolors in ice cube trays, and freeze the trays with a plastic penguin on top of each ice cube space. Then, invite children to use the penguins to paint on a piece of paper as if they’re gliding around on the ice! At the end of this fun art process, the children will find that they have created unique watercolor designs.
Children in preschool and pre-k enjoy opportunities to participate in experiments that explore scientific concepts. Through these activities, children will practice skills in observation, testing, and forming hypotheses.
This simple activity introduces children to basic scientific concepts as they observe how, over the course of a few days, salt goes through changes to form crystals that look like snowflakes. For this experiment, you’ll need salt, a few mason jars (1 for each snowflake), pipe cleaners, and clothes pins. Prepare the saltwater in advance by boiling water and then slowly adding salt until crystals start to form on the surface of the water (it will take almost the entire container of salt for three snowflakes). When you’re ready to start the activity, invite children to form snowflakes with the pipecleaners, then help them to secure them to the jar using the clothespins. Pour the saltwater over the pipecleaners and watch the crystals form over the next few days!
This activity requires only a few ingredients and introduces little ones to basic chemistry! You’ll need full fat milk, blue food coloring, Dawn dish soap, a few q-tips, and a cookie cutter– in the shape of a snowman or snowflake for a winter-themed experiment. To get started, pour your milk into a flat dish along with the cookie cutter and a few drops of food coloring. Then, coat the q-tip in dish soap and gently touch the food coloring with the q-tip to observe a chemical reaction between the dish soap and the food coloring that makes a fascinating swirl effect, changing the color of the milk!
Process art activities that offer unique materials can be great learning and discovery opportunities for preschoolers and children in pre-k. The activities below encourage creative expression and exploration of different materials.
This simple art activity lets children use a variety of materials, as well as their imaginations, to decorate a paper snowman. All you will need are white circles (cut out of construction paper or felt), buttons, tape, craft sticks, googly eyes, puff balls, small pieces of construction paper, and some glue.
This unique art activity invites children to create a sparkly design using paints and glitter on blue or purple construction paper. White and blue paint can be applied with a brush or cork stamp to include snow and ice for a wintery scene. Adding liquid glue and glitter will give the design some frosty sparkle!
This simple activity requires almost no set up at all. Using legos as stamps, create igloos on blue construction paper! Children will stamp legos in a tower formation – similar to how igloos are made by stacking icy bricks on top of each other to make a structure. Once children have finished their igloos, compare all of their unique designs!
Cooking with young children is a great way to support early development, with plenty of opportunities to practice science, math, language, and motor skills.
From marshmallows to rice cakes, there are many round, white ingredients that can be used to make a snowman-themed snack. Try placing two or three marshmallows on top of each other, with pretzel sticks for arms and chocolate chips or icing for eyes. You’ll find more ideas for creating snowman snacks here.
For more wintery fun, check out the activities included in these articles from the G2K archives:
