Saturday, February 19, 2011

Indoor Winter Fun

Indoor winter fun


There are endless possibilities when it comes to indoor fun during a New England winter. Some of my favorites include baking, playing games, and making paper snowflakes. When my children were little, as a stay-at-home mom, ours would often be the go-to house when it came to snow days. This sometimes resulted in a houseful of kids!

After a morning of quiet-ish activities such as building blocks, dolls, dominoes, and the like, it was time to get moving! Getting the kids to clean up was easy as they were excited about what we were going to do next—go sliding—indoors and not with sleds. What? You are probably thinking. That’s right, on bad weather days we would do static electricity experiments with a small plastic slide in our family room!

The kids got in a line and took turns sliding down the slide. I gave them old keys to hold. When they got off the slide, they tried to see how close they could get to someone else’s key to make a spark jump. It was really great on dark and dreary days to see that electricity crackle through the air. We rubbed balloons on our heads and stuck them to walls. The kids loved it when their hair stood up on end! We put salt and pepper on paper plates and made the pepper jump onto a static-filled balloon! Science was my salvation on those long days when I was grossly outnumbered.

Now that my kids are grown, snow days are much quieter, filled with correcting papers and shoveling out elderly parents. It’s fun to remember the look of wonderment and joy on the kids’ faces on those wild winter days.

Do you have any snow day memories? I’d love to hear about them! Please leave me a comment below.

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