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40+ Winter Sensory Play Activities to Keep Your Kids Active and Engaged

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I am so excited to share with you our ultimate sensory play guide to winter themed sensory play! Today we are sharing over 40 sensory play ideas that you can do indoors and outdoors this Winter.

It’s not too early to start planning for winter. Sensory play is a great way to get kids engaged and entertained in the colder months. Winter sensory play can be perfectly adapted for just about any age group – toddlers, preschoolers, or school aged children. Kids of all ages will have so much fun exploring the ideas that we have gathered for you here in this blog post. 

Sensory play also has many benefits including enhancing creativity, improving language skills, and encouraging curiosity.

This guide includes tonnes of ideas and set ups that you can choose for your winter sensory play activity, whether you want to go with winter sensory bottles, sensory writing bags, Christmas themed sensory bins, sensory art activities, active whole body sensory play activities or something else.

Over 40 Winter sensory play ideas and activities for kids to do indoors and outdoors during winter

Sensory play is not just about messy play ideas, it can also be about engaging the senses of sound, smell, sight, and even engaging whole body senses of proprioception (this is is your body’s ability to sense movement, action, and location)

We love to feature sensory play ideas, so I’ve gathered together some of the great Winter sensory activities that your kids are sure to enjoy. I hope this list will provide some inspiration and help you plan a great winter activity!

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Loom Band Sensory Bottles

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Loom bands make ideal fillers for sensory bottles (aka discovery bottles). They are bright and colourful, small enough to easily fit inside any bottle, and float around nicely to create a cool effect. Making your own loom band sensory bottle is easy. It only takes a couple of minutes and 3 ingredients.

I’ve made a quick video to show just how super easy it is to make these simple sensory bottles, so check that out towards the end of the post.

How to make a sensory bottle with loom bands. These are so easy and quick to make, and fun to play with afterwards. The effect of the colourful loom bands moving around is so calming and relaxing

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 6 Ways to Encourage Your Kids to Play Outside

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Today’s most of the kids spending hours daily in front of electronics devices, such as phones, tablets, laptops and television. In fact, 43% of kids would prefer to stay indoors and play with technology, rather than getting outside and enjoying the fresh air. There’s no denying that today’s kids are swapping active, outdoor play for a more sedentary lifestyle, causing severe consequences for their health and their overall well-being. So, how do you encourage your kids to outdoor play? Read on to know more.

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20 Fun and Frugal ideas to create the Best Backyard Playground for your Kids this Summer

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Summer is here, and that means outdoor fun and lots of time spent in the garden. If you’re looking for ways to entertain your kids this summer, these awesome backyard ideas should give you some inspiration to create a play area that fun and frugal summer that memories are made of.

Cool features to add to your backyard this Summer

We have some amazing ideas here for kids of all ages. Let us walk you through the best backyard playgrounds that we could find. Both younger children and older kids will love these playful set ups!

Lets take a closer look at these outdoor play equipment ideas. 

20 awesome features to add to your backyard this summer, all are cheap to make or even free. Great diy garden play ideas

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Big Little Tent Festival

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Big Little Tent Festival was created last year during lockdown, since we aren’t able to be out there exploring just now, Caravan Club came up with this idea to allow families to have fun and continue the excitement of camping at home. The festival aims to bring the great outdoors to you – in the comfort of your own home.

This year’s Big Little Tent Festival will be taking place over the Easter weekend, 3-4th April and includes lots of fun filled activities as part of the festival schedule, including a Zoom party to meet The Mermaid Princess and The Friendly Neighbourhood Hero for games, superhero training, and a campfire song!

You can see the full events schedule here, and start planning which bits you most want to join in and get involved.

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Surprise Egg Sink or Float Experiment

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Sink or float is one of the most popular classic science experiments for kids. It’s so easy to set up, and a great way to introduce them to basic experiments at home. This fun twist on the classic experiment uses surprise eggs to add another element of fun to the activity.

This sink or float surprise egg STEM activity was part of our #NickJrBlaze Twitter party. We’ve been trying out the new range of Blaze and the Monster Machines toys from Fisher Price, click the link to find out more about them.

Surprise egg sink or float experiment

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How to find the top toys that your kids will really play with

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Every child is different, and with these varied personalities and interests you will need different toys to best keep your child occupied and entertained. Recently, I was having this discussion with one of my mum groups about which toys are most used by our 4 year olds these days and it was really interesting to see the different trends.

Depending on your child’s personality, we will guide you through some of the top toys categories that will hopefully get plenty of play time, rather than sitting unloved on the shelf.

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Make your own Kaleidoscope Craft

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Kaleidoscope

Have fun making this Kaleidoscope craft with the kids. This simple kaleidoscope works best when it is held up to the light. Move the tube around to see the pretty colours, glitter and sequins dance around.

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What is a Kaleidoscope?

A kaleidoscope (/kəˈlaɪdəskoʊp/) is an optical instrument with two or more reflecting surfaces tilted to each other at an angle, so that one or more (parts of) objects on one end of the mirrors are seen as a regular symmetrical pattern when viewed from the other end, due to repeated reflection (definition from Wikipedia)

Kaleidoscopes work by reflecting light, so this is a fun science project for kids, as they think about how the light bumps into the shiny surfaces, changes direction, reflects back and forth and makes the kaleidoscope work – with such cool results.

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11 lockdown activities for kids to inspire creativity

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We have all been stuck indoors for a while so it is always good to have some ideas of how to keep the little ones entertained during lockdown. We still have only a few months to go until things go back to normal – hopefully – so read on to get some inspiration. Anna and I collected a few activities we have done with our little ones that could probably help you out when you are feeling stuck.

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