Snow play! Without all the bundling! From Colleen:
There is something to be said for playing in the snow. From the mouth of my mom, “Kids need fresh air every day”. But thinking about dressing the kids to go play in the snow sends shivers up my spine.
What really irks me is that it takes longer to bundle my munchkins up for their outside experience than it does for them to get cold and want to come right back in.
So today, instead of dealing with the whole fiasco, I decided to shovel some snow into a big Rubbermaid container, put the kids in their boots and mittens and head to the bathtub. Dumping the snow in the bathtub, I gave them each a cup and a spoon for digging, threw them in and presto – a winter wonderland.
And, as an added bonus, it killed almost an hour of the never ending, stuck in the house, going crazy with two rambunctious kids day! You can’t beat that!
This also works well with children who are sick or unable to go outside but don’t want to miss playing in the snow.
Check out the adorable picture on Colleen’s blog.
That is absolutely brilliant!
And I have enough snow outside to fill an Olympic sized pool right now. 🙂
Oh, if only it could be mailed. My southern babes would LOVE to see and touch real snow. Kids in Georgia think snow is something like the cottonballs they use in preschool art. I’m not complaining, just offering to share!
I saw that in Family Fun this month-we had a great time with it, and the bonus was to turn on the hot shower at the end and have a great lesson on meltage 🙂
I have thought about doing this in the kitchen sink before. We do bubbles with food colouring as water play in the kitchen sink which is a lot of fun!
What a great idea with the bathtub, though!
Love the snow/bath tub idea. What I did with my four year old son, who also adores the snow, is to fill a large pan with uncooked white rice. I told him that this was our indoor snow scene, and he had a blast. We made a snowman out of Play Doh, cottonball snow balls, spoon shovel, etc. Lots of imagination and creativity.
For about an hour and a half on Friday night I was the Greatest Dad Ever, according to my 6 year old.
Thanks for the idea-totally fantastic!
My 4yr old DD’s pre-school does this on the rare occasion we have snow here. They also tie plain white paper plates to the kids feet and let them ice skate across the carpet. These are some of her favorite winter activities
HI