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Winter can be a cozy time of cuddles, warm food, and pretty decor, but it can also make parents feel frazzled with cabin fever and snotty little ones. It's challenging to take toddlers and babies outside enough in the cold, especially when they are sick.
Bitter winter cold drives families with young children to stay warm at home, but entertaining babies and toddlers day after day can be tiring for parents. Having a list of fun activities handy to pass the time and engagingly educate little ones makes winter easier!
Below, I've shared my go-to winter activities for babies and toddlers, even when they are sick. These activities are worth a try!
1. Making Garlands
Making garlands is a simple, repetitive task that many toddlers enjoy doing. Babies can play with the end product but should probably stay out of the supply bin! Garlands can be made of paper loops stapled together or buttons on a string.
If you don't happen to have an obscene number of buttons lying around, you can find them sold by the pound online for just a few dollars. I enjoyed using vintage buttons, but my toddlers liked using a color pattern (white and red, black and white, pink and purple, etc.). These make fun gifts for family members!
Another garland idea is stringing popped popcorn on a thread to hang on a tree outside for the birds. My littles love this tradition in our family because they get to watch the birds come into the yard.
2. Cookie Decorating
You cannot make it through winter without some cookies! Cookie decorating is messy but exciting for little ones. Make some sugar cookies or gingerbread shapes, whip up some frosting, and break out the sprinkles!
I always put the baby in a high chair with a small cookie and a little frosting (over six months old), but each of my babies mainly wanted to smear the frosting around and wear whatever he or she could.
Older toddlers like the idea of building gingerbread houses; however, they are typically not gentle enough to do so without breaking the house and crying in frustration. Keep it simple with cookies, frosting, and sprinkles!
3. Fort Building
Winter is the season of indoor forts! While home with a baby and toddler on cold, sick days, indoor forts were a surefire way I could keep both kids entertained and safe.
To ensure the fort wouldn't fall on my baby or toddler, I would clear out the bottom of a closet, stack toy bins on either side of the door, and put a well-anchored blanket or cardboard box across the top of the opening. They loved it, and I didn't have to worry about anything smothering them while I cooked dinner!
Bonus Tip: A clean dog bed makes a fantastic cushion for the bottom of forts and reading nooks. My little ones often napped in a dog bed we bought just for them!
4. Dressing Up
Dress-up sounds like it wouldn't be entertaining for little ones, but toddlers enjoy it! You can use costumes or make up ideas with whatever you have around the house. My little ones loved having a towel or baby blanket tied around their shoulders to be superheroes.
Making a king or queen costume is easy, too! Whatever costumes you make can be played out with an activity. For example, I once dressed my kids up as chefs (a paper chef hat, aprons, and black pants). We then headed to the kitchen to knead bread dough for dinner. They enjoyed playing the part!
Another fun dress-up activity we shared was dressing as scientists in lab coats, mixing glasses of colored water, and writing the color results as we went.
5. Video Fun
Time with your little ones goes too fast, so take advantage of winter days at home by making short videos! Telling stories, pretending to be superheroes, and singing songs make cherished videos to watch years later.
Another video type we enjoyed making was jump-frame videos. We would ask the kids to do something and either remove frames in editing or take a series of three-second videos.
This resulted in an adorable collection of videos with our kids "magically" jumping into a different room, stepping into a different costume, or eating something quickly. It was a fun way to play indoors!
6. Making Music
A toddler and baby making music sounds more like making a racket, but they enjoy it! You can make some if you don't have a set of baby-safe instruments. Empty buckets, plastic containers, pots, pans, and the like make loud drums your little ones will happily bang away on.
Little ones may be struck with some mischievous inspiration, so watch out for improvisation, like whacking each other or glass.
7. Building with Magnet Tiles
Magnet tiles are tangible, colorful, and easy to play with, even for babies! You can try building towers, houses, and castles, but you can also link them together to make roads for your toddler to follow with cars.
Another fun use is making an incline with a wide board or large piece of cardboard and arranging the magnet tiles in a pattern on the surface. Then, roll a ball, car, or handful of marbles down the incline. My toddlers spent hoursdoing this!
8. Coloring or Painting
No list of indoor activities is complete without coloring or painting. You can get creative with this by using washable markers on a mirror or window (with close supervision) or try face painting.
In early winter, my family makes a couple of new ornaments for the Christmas tree. Whether clay or little paper shapes, painting small ornaments is a fun afternoon activity!
Another ornament craft idea is collecting a few pine cones, spraying them with glue, and letting your toddler roll them in glitter.
9. Making Cardboard Box Houses
Playing in cardboard box houses is a classic childhood pastime! You can squeeze more time from them by setting your child inside with some markers or crayons to color whatever they want.
My little ones would color their boxes for a long while, but they would color even more if I was coloring, too.
Cardboard boxes can be whatever you want them to be! We've made cars, airplanes, robots, tunnels, and much more out of them.
10. Reading Together
Reading is crucial to exposing your child to new vocabulary and helping him develop his attention span and identification skills. When stuck inside due to cold or illness, books become the only way to explore the outside world while staying still enough to get well.
However, babies and one-year-olds are sometimes a bit too squirmy to sit through an entire book. Read about ways to make reading at these ages more productive in 10 Tips for Encouraging Your One-Year-Old's Love of Books.
11. Winter Sensory Bins
Young children and babies love touching everything, so why not create some sensory bins to entertain that desire? Sensory bins can be as simple as a container with uncooked macaroni or rice with a toy bulldozer.
Sensory toys and bins are not the same, though they aim to engage the senses. Montessori education toys are also sometimes confused with these. To better understand how these three differ, along with some sensory activity ideas for babies, read Are Montessori and Sensory Toys the Same Thing?
12. Learning to Identify ABCs and 123s
Whether you plan to homeschool your children or not is a decision that will come in a few short years, but you can start educating your child now by playing letter and number identification games.
Letter magnets, books, making letter or number chains, and coloring letter or number sheets are just a few ways you can begin familiarizing your little one with her ABCs and 123s at home.
13. Doing Boat or Rollercoaster Rides
One game our little ones enjoyed during those first winters together was sitting in a laundry basket or plastic box and going for a ride. I would put a first-person perspective of a roller coaster on the TV and move the bin they were sitting in as if they were on that roller coaster.
Sometimes, we would pretend the floor was water and take a boat ride through the house, fishing for stuffed animals along the way. If the floor was lava, we would crawl across furniture and use pillows as stepping stones. The baby would chuckle at these antics from her playmat or join in a box ride!
14. Doing Science Experiments in the Cold
Cold weather makes experiments with ice or steam obvious for little eyes! We learned everything from how animals stay warm in the snow to how frost forms to timing how long it took to freeze hot water versus cold water.
We also learned about snowflake uniqueness (and made paper snowflakes), melted snow with various temperatures of water, and packed snow to make shapes. These are way over a baby's head in content, but playing and watching was still fun!
15. Making Snow
Another indoor winter activity for toddlers and babies is making snow out of baking soda and shaving cream. I mix four pounds of baking soda with ten or more ounces of shaving cream.
Once everything is mixed together, you have a powdery, snow-like mix that you can pack together like a snowball. Make a sensory bin with characters, cars, a village, balls, or anything else they want to play with! You can even use this mixture to teach your kids about animal tracks.
When finished, scoop the mixture into a plastic bag or airtight bin and play again the next day.
16. Drawing and Writing Letters to Family and Friends
Sending letters to loved ones is a lost art in modern culture, but it is such a sweet activity to do with children of all ages. Get some colored paper and coloring supplies, fold the paper in half to make a card, and let your little ones doodle.
Once finished, ask them to share a message for someone that you can write on the card and send. You'll likely get some hilarious phrases strung together, but folks love it. It's even better when your littles receive a response in the mail!
17. Starting Seeds Indoors
Toward the end of winter, consider teaching your toddler about seeds and plants through books at the library. Then, take your toddler to the store to pick out some seeds and plant them in cups at home.
When they start to sprout, your toddler may get excited! As temperatures warm up outside, you can prepare a small garden bed and show your toddler how to plant their sprouts.
18. Running a Backyard Leaf or Snow Track
Getting outside is essential to not going crazy, even if it is cold outside! You can encourage your toddler to burn off some energy by making a racetrack with fallen leaves or snow in the backyard.
You can try playing tag on the track, race each other, or play "Red Light, Green Light." If you have multiple kids or expect more kids to visit at some point, you can make this track large enough for everyone!
19. Making a Winter Birdhouse
Building a birdhouse from scrap wood or a kit is an excellent winter activity for toddlers. You can teach them how to measure wood, put pieces together with glue, and talk about how birds build nests.
Once put together, you can help your toddler paint the birdhouse and find a place to put it outside. Your toddler will likely want to check the birdhouse often for eggs!
20. Having an Indoor Snowball Fight
Do you have a lot of scrap paper? Take some time to cut each page in half and draw a picture of something your toddler will recognize on each one. Then, crunch all the paper into individual "snowballs."
When ready, start a snowball fight inside. Duck behind furniture, run around, and have fun! But when the timer goes off, it's time to open a snowball in your hand and name what you see. I've played this game with eight to twelve toddlers every year, and it's still a ridiculous burst of excitement!
In a Nutshell
For some, winter feels like it drags on forever, especially when one or more young children at home keep getting sick. Be better prepared this winter by arming yourself with some fun indoor activities! What are some of your winter favorites?
