The days are shorter and the weather is colder, which means that winter is here! The season’s icy weather and cool colors can be incorporated into fun activities for young children that encourage exploration, discovery, and math skill development. In this article, you’ll find several winter-inspired ideas for exploring STEM concepts with the children in your care.
STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, and it describes the many learning activities that apply to these four topic areas. STEM activities for early learners emphasize inquiry and discovery by encouraging children to ask questions, form hypotheses, and use problem-solving skills. If you’re interested in learning more about STEM, you might enjoy What is STEM Learning?, an article from the G2K archives that offers ideas for making STEM part of an early childhood curriculum.
The winter weather provides a great opportunity for learning about animals and hibernation patterns. Around this time of year, children are often particularly curious about polar bears, penguins, and other animals that live in cold environments.
To get children thinking more about the places that animals live, invite them to create animal dens, using marshmallows and toothpicks. This engineering activity encourages children to plan, design, and build structures and invites conversations about animals that live in cold-weather habitats.
Click here to find more information about setting up this activity.
This activity is especially fun when paired with picture books about animals that live in cold weather habits. You’ll find great winter animal stories for infants, toddlers and preschoolers in the G2K article, Winter Books for Early Learners.
When the weather gets cold, children might observe frost on the windows at home, at school, or in the car. This quick and easy-to-set-up activity helps children discover how frost forms, and allows them to create their own frost, using just a few materials: a clean recycled can, ice, salt, and water.
To watch the way that frost forms, you and the children will place crushed ice into the cans until they are halfway full. Next, add water and salt, wait for a few moments, and watch frost form on the outside of the can. Any leftover ice can also be used for sensory exploration!
Click here for more details about this activity, including how the salt affects the temperature in the can and makes it possible for icy crystals (frost) to form.
Science experiments are a favorite activity in many preschool classrooms, and they are also a great way to introduce foundational chemistry principles. Children love to observe the way different materials interact with one another to make oozing and melting chemical reactions. This melting evergreen activity is all about the reaction that occurs when baking soda and vinegar are combined. When the two ingredients are mixed with each other, carbon dioxide is created with a chemical reaction that can be observed by all five of our senses.
The trees can be made a day ahead of time and frozen until a couple of hours before you’re ready for the melting experiment. To form the trees, combine baking soda, green food coloring, and just enough water to enable the mixture to hold together and be formed into shapes. Next, pack the mixture into a kitchen funnel, or into cones made out of paper plates, and place them in the freezer until a couple of hours before you’re ready to start the melting tree experiment.
When you are ready to begin the experiment, encourage children to squirt drops of vinegar onto the trees and to observe the way the vinegar causes the trees to fizz and melt. You can ask children to make hypotheses about how long it will take the trees to melt, and how many drops of vinegar will be needed to melt the trees!
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Number games are a fun way to help children learn foundational math skills, including number recognition, 1:1 correspondence, and counting. This winter math activity is quick to put together and requires just a few materials: construction paper, cotton balls, and numbered shapes made from cardboard, and provides a lot of opportunities for adding more advanced learning, such as adding or removing snowballs to learn about addition or subtraction.
This activity can incorporate counting out loud, matching the snow/cotton balls to the printed numbers, comparing quantities of snowballs, and even adding or removing snowballs to introduce addition or subtraction.
Click here to find more information about setting up and playing this math game.
For additional play-based STEM activities, you might enjoy:
4 Healthy, Kid-friendly Recipes Featuring Seasonal Winter Produce 
Exploring Cold Weather: Winter Activities & Books for Young Children
