At Home Holiday Activities and a Target Gift Card Give Away
We have one more week of school left before two weeks of term break. In the warmer months I’d just send the kids outside in the morning and tell them to come back when they were hungry, but the weather isn’t really conducive to lots of outside time at the moment so I am getting together a list of things to do during these wintery holidays…
Things to do during an at home winter holiday.
Make a Lego balloon car.
Have a movie night sleep over with a friend
Make Bath Fizzies
Read, read, read!
Make honey comb
Play some card games. UNO is a favourite but we might try this maths game for the girls
Paint, glue and draw.
Try our hand at finger knitting
Make potions outside if it’s not raining.
Explore with masking tape and newspaper.
Play jenga
Glow sticks in the bath
Play dough, play dough and more play dough
Make our own Moon Sand.
Stock up for the Holidays with a Target Gift Card Give Away.
This give-away is now closed. Congratulations to Kate A. who is the winner.
I was able to stock up on some books, art supplies and other goodies for the holidays at the Target Toy Sale earlier this week.
If you need to stock up too then you’re in luck! I have a $50 Target gift card to give away!
To enter tell me what your favourite ‘at home’ holiday activity is. The coolest, most interesting, funnest idea, as judged by my kids, will win a $50 Target gift card.
To enter you must be an Australian resident and provide a valid email address. Entries are limited to one per household.
Entries close midday AEST Saturday June 30th 2012, the winner will be contacted by email and announced on this post. The winner must contact me within 5 days or the prize will be re-drawn. The winner agree to have their postal address and details passed on to the PR company who will send out the prizes.
{disclosure : I was given some Target gift cards for myself and my kids to spend at the Toy Sale. The opinions and ideas expressed in this post are purely my own.}
My kids will be off to their Dad’s farm and playing in the MUD!! There is mud stomping, mud pies with glitter, “being muddy monsters”, they wrap mud in toilet paper and call them dim sims, mud ball throwing, mud sculpting, mud moulding. And me? I’ll be washing muddy clothes. Maybe there is an activity in that?
My kids are already planning to create an enormous cubby. They have been hoarding bits of wire, large sticks, old bits of wood, and any other treasure they can find around the farm in preparation.
We love making cubby houses in doors as well as “camping out” in the lounge room overnight, We get the whole family involved, have a pretend fire, cook like we would camping and best of all lots of marshmellows cooked over a candle lol, its messy but we all have fun!
I have been hoarding boxes, containers, bottles and tubes for the last three months and this school holiday we are going to make the biggest princess, fairy, Lego castle village in the WHOLE world! We are going to stick, glue, paste, paint and create, preferably covering the whole dining room table, an ongoing project that will keep us busy for days and hopefully end up being not only fun to build but fun to play with as well!
We love volcanoes with bicarbonate and vinegar, and lots of bubble blowing! Don’t underestimate the warmth of your local swimming pool too! Enjoy!
Having a movie marathon (kids films/comedies) with homemade pizzas (that we all create), popcorn and chockies and if the kids want to do something different out comes the LEGO to exercise the fingers and use some creativity.
we get out our fort kit (I used a tutorial at saltwaterkids.com to make it but I can’t link to it since my computer is telling me it’s a malware site) , close the curtains and turn their whole bedroom into a cave/cubby house/fort. ‘it leads to hours of fun and imaginary play, and mess!
My daughter and I made felt pipe cleaner rose rings for Mother’s day. It is the PERFECT holiday boredom buster because all you need is pipe cleaners (8 to make one). You can make a rose ring for each finger OR you can just make the rose and make a beautiful bouquet.
For boys, making spiders out of pipe cleaners is easy and entertaining. They can name their insect and explain what it does or what other bugs it likes to eat.
Just to add, google ‘Pipe Cleaner rose rings’ and the Martha Stuart link will come up with instructions on how to make. So easy – even four year olds can make them.
Inside olympics!! Firstly we write challenges, games and things we can compete at onto pieces of paper that are placed into a hat (Wii games, Dsi games, board games, card games, races and so on). One by one they are drawn out, and we play, laugh and compete like crazy because at the end of each fun thing someone gets a gold, silver or green (our equivalent to bronze) star, stuck next to their name on the fridge. This goes on all week, a few activities each day. At the end of the week our Gold medalist, the winner becomes King or Queen for a day, where we all have to do what they say (limited of course!!)….like cleaning their room, playing what they want to and of course eating meals they have selected. It’s great fun, and we all want to be the winner, Mum & Dad included!!
I am so going to make that lego balloon car with my kids! They will love it! great ideas~!
Painting. I like to bring out their creative side!
We like to have letter-based theme days – like P Day, where we read books starting with P, eat porridge, popcorn, pizza, pasta and pumpkin, paint, playdoh, etc.
We also have ladies’ tea parties – we bake scones, whip cream and make ladyfinger shortbread, prettify the table and dress up, get out the good china and invite the neighbours in with hand-drawn invitations. The 7 year old and I even play piano so it’s like a real high tea, although we only know one classical piece apiece really well so we end up at Bob Dylan and John Lennon, and nursery rhyme songs, quite fast :-)
My kids want to go geocaching. We haven’t done it before but have friends that love it so we will be having a big adventure and not sure what we will find.
We are going geochaching. We haven’t done it before but have friends that have so will be great fun. lots of adventure and not sure what we will find.
One of the things my kids love to do over the holidays is painting – whether inside, in the bathroom with shaving cream, or their favourite – outside on the easel. What makes it so special? We set up the mini tramp in front of it and they jump and splash paint everywhere. Sometimes they even collect leaves and flowers from the garden and add them to the painting. Great fun!
I’m looking after my 8 year old grand daughter some of the holidays and will be trying out a new craft..painting by numbers.These kits are so cheap at Riot Craft and very absorbing,time will fly.
At the start of the holidays we write down a big list of activities to do at home and then put all the ideas into a hat. Each morning we pick two out of the hat to do that day!
My kids love cutting out toys/clothes/supermarket stuff from the catalogues/junk mail received in our letter box then pasting on paper to make ‘make believe shops’.
We have a pop up tent just for inside that will go up day 1 of the holidays and not come down until the end. It ends up being used for all sorts of wonderful things – a shop, doll’s house, nap time zone, a race track, reading nook, lego holder, dress up wardrobe, tv watching cuddle hut, night time light show viewing spot, a portable disco (just add lights, bubble machine and homemade decorations), a soft toy zoo (when the fly is off), the Little People town, etc, etc, etc…
The best thing is that it gets used over and over again for whatever we can imagine and I only paid $15 for it! We have had our money’s worth out of it 100 times over.