Winter holidays aren’t just for kids. Everyone is waiting for them, from young to old. A series of New Year holidays invites family trips, walks, interesting conversations and outdoor games. How to spend fun winter holidays with maximum pleasure and benefit?
Planning a vacation
Sometimes even a long, long-awaited winter vacation is not enough to fulfill all the points of the program planned in advance and enjoy family communication. But it also happens that before the holidays, some parents (especially parents of preschoolers) begin to think: what to do with children on long winter evenings? This is especially true for families living in the northern latitudes: the bitter frosts that occur during the New Year and Christmas holidays can disrupt all plans.
In order not to regret wasted time, spend a few hours on a December day off to make a plan. Come up with your own “winter fairy tale” and do not forget to involve all household members in its creation, as far as their age allows.
First of all, determine a few points – options for recreation:
- home rest,
- cultural recreation,
- leisure.
It’s a good idea to check the weather forecast ahead of time. This way you can guess how many days you will need to spend at home or at indoor cultural events, and which days you can devote to fun walks and outdoor activities.
Now you can make a preliminary New Year’s schedule. Be sure to include meetings with family and friends. But always remember that the main benefit of the winter holidays is your communication with children, which is so lacking in the rest of the time, full of worries and work. Therefore, try to include in the general activities of all members of your family, from the smallest to the most mature. Give yourself and your children positive emotions and a great festive mood during the New Year holidays.
Rest at home – fun and useful
Home rest is necessary for everyone, since usually we spend little time together at home. But spending a few days in front of the TV will be the most boring and wrong choice, especially for children. In the paragraph “home vacation” we will write several interesting options for home leisure:
- New Year’s ball. Design and make costumes for everyone, even pets. For a while, turn the apartments for rent in louisville ky into a “magic studio”. For costumes, old wardrobe items and various New Year’s attributes – tinsel, sequins, serpentine are suitable. As soon as the atelier finishes work, turn on your favorite music and start dancing. Thus, your kids learn imaginative thinking, generate ideas, embody their plans and dance!
- Gift Workshop. Before Christmas, making interesting gifts would be the right decision: preschoolers will benefit greatly from creativity, developing imagination and fine motor skills, and all relatives will receive pleasant surprises in a New Year’s wrapper. Take care of craft materials, paints, modeling mass, colored paper and cardboard in advance.
- New Year’s cuisine. One of the days of the holidays can be devoted to the joint preparation of delicious simple dishes. Pick up a few recipes on the Internet in advance that children 5-7 years old can handle. If you have two or more children, you can announce a contest, for example, for the best cake. Or maybe it will be a joint cake? It’s not bad to cook with dad on this day, leaving mom the role of a grateful spectator.
- Holiday Quest. It’s not at all difficult to come up with a “maze of gifts” within the apartment. We hide a pre-prepared present in a closet or refrigerator. Children aged 5-6 do not have to be able to read, but they can navigate by arrows and find notes that adults will read to them. The note contains a puzzle pointing to the next clue.
And first-graders already know how to read and write by the New Year holidays. In this case, the quest can be diversified with puzzles, which make up a word indicating the place where the gift was hidden. Make tasks appropriate for your age – not too easy, but not too difficult.
A home performance will be an excellent option for family entertainment one of the evenings. Children love to play theater, play roles from familiar fairy tales or poems. Arrange a family performance – choose a fairy tale that the child knows almost by heart. You can turn into actors yourself, or you can arrange a puppet show. Finding a set of hand puppets in the store is not so difficult, but you can make them yourself from old mittens and gloves. How much joy will be in the process of rehearsals and the performance itself! Believe me, every child has an acting talent and a desire to surprise adults. And invite grandparents as grateful spectators, you will get a great gift from grandchildren.
Cultural recreation – simple and tasteful
Many institutions hold New Year’s performances, thematic exhibitions, performances, master classes for children and adults. There are many interesting options, it remains to look at the city poster and choose where to go.
- For a New Year’s performance in the city cultural center: a New Year tree, Santa Claus and the Snow Maiden, round dances, contests and a sweet gift – what child would refuse?
- To the theater with the whole family, and you definitely will not regret it! The quality of the performances is an order of magnitude higher than on ordinary days, and it will be not only interesting, but also useful for children to watch an interesting performance with excellent acting by the actors.
- To the museum. The ideal option would be a local history museum, which is available in almost any city.
- New Year’s concerts are a wonderful holiday. As a rule, during the New Year holidays, both New Year and Christmas concerts and repertoire are held, usually available for both adults and children.
Winter outdoor fun
If the day is sunny, go for a walk with the whole family. Tip: do not wrap your baby, and do not forget to decorate your outerwear with New Year’s attributes.
What to do on a walk?
- Let’s make a snowman. This is a very useful outdoor activity. Take buttons, colored ribbons, mittens from home – your snow sculptures will turn out bright and memorable.
- Coloring a snowman or a snow fort. To do this, take plastic bottles with diluted gouache of different colors. We make a hole in the lid: be careful, colorful splashes!
- We make an ice slide. Make sure that all family members have shovels – the work will be argued faster.
- We play snowballs. Here you don’t have to persuade anyone – everyone will have fun!
- We go down the hills, make a mysterious trail on skis, try to make patterns on the ice with skates – all these outdoor activities give a charge of vivacity and good mood. And at the same time they train not only strength and endurance, but also spatial representations.
- We depict an angel in the snow. If your fidget loves to lie in pure snow, then do not deny him this pleasure! Find a flat area of pure snow, have the child lie on his back and move his arms and legs. Carefully lift the baby: the silhouette of an angel will appear on the snow.
- New Year holidays are fabulous winter days, which means that any walk can turn into a magical holiday.
