Here are a few activities for preschool children at home on those cold, rainy days. Some of these may also be useful for parents who are homeschooling and in need of ideas for younger siblings who are also at home.
How about a nice cup of tea?
When it’s cold outside why not make Mummy, Daddy or even a Tiger a cup of tea! My daughter loved using ‘real’ tea bags to mix with warm water, milk and sugar. She repeated the activity again and again and we tried using different types of tea bags turning the water different colours and smelling the different favours. Finally, we read the story: ‘The Tiger who came to Tea’ and my daughter soon created a tea party with her teddies and that’s when we ate all the biscuits!
Homemade Sock Puppets
Great idea for a rainy day. Unwanted socks and any craft materials you have lying around the house: beads, twine, cardboard, ribbon, googley eyes, pom poms. I often peel off nice crafty bits from cards I’ve been given and keep them in a box then get them out when making something just like this!
Fun with cardboard boxes
Just need boxes! Remember, children are the ones who have all the ideas, so hand it over to them.
Designer Wellies
When it’s so wet outside why not design and make a new pair of a wellies! We used quality street wrappers left over from Christmas (we had to eat a few extra as there wasn’t enough) and we glued them onto wellie shaped card. My youngest really enjoyed getting to use scissors (with adult supervision) and just spent ages just cutting up the card.
Homemade Playdoh
My children love playdoh but love it even more if they have made it themselves .Choosing the colours and watching it take form can be very exciting. Here’s a simple recipe and method we use: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/playdough-recipe
Tasty Self Portraits
Inspired by the artist ‘Giuseppe Arcimboldo’, why not make a portrait of yourself or your family using fruit, vegetables ad flowers. My son enjoyed choosing his materials and chopping the vegetables up. Here’s is self portrait.
Nature Collage
Another simple activity which just requires the children to collect natural objects on their walks to create pictures from. We added googly eyes, glitter and oil pastels for fun!
Missing Longleat? Missing Softplay?
We used duplo bricks, toy animals and cars and made our own Longleat and Safari. My son was also the ticket man that I had to pay before entry. We also chucked all our cushions off the sofa to recreate a ‘Soft Play’ area indoors when it was raining. This was more fun than I expected!
Balloons
You can do so much with a pack of balloons! We drew faces on them, used badminton rackets to keep them in the air, played hide and seek, musical balloon bumps (when music stops you have to sit on a balloon and if it pops you’re out!) and finally, we used a balloon to BLAST our rocket into space! See: https://www.stem.org.uk/resources/elibrary/resource/336420/balloon-rocket#&gid=undefined&pid=1
Pasta Play
All you need is a variety of containers (preferably with lids, as children love taking these on and off), a saucepan, a mixing bowl, a sieve and a variety of spoons. We began by shaking each container to hear what sound it would make. My daughter really enjoyed the anticipation of finding out what was inside. When she opened them up she instantly began to explore, snapping the spaghetti, stirring the rice, sieving the lentils and cooking it all in the pan.
Drumming Workshop
Noisy but kept my daughter entertained for ages (so much drumming she had to take her top off as she was so hot!) You just a selection of different sounding pots and pans and a variety of wooden spoons and spatulas. We extended it by playing music in the background and ended with a performance at the end.
Painting with toys
Dip toy cars or animals into different coloured paints and take them for a drive or walk all over a large piece of paper. It should to create a colourful painting like this. You could cut it out into the shape of a rainbow afterwards!
Elmer Milk Bottle or something completely different…
You may have seen this already. The idea was passed onto me by a friend. Looked great but to be honest it as too hard for my 2 year old and my 4 year old just wanted to make his own thing…a Darth Vader mask! So I let my 2 year old (who just couldn’t understand how a milk bottle was an elephant) glue copious amounts of tissue paper onto her toy elephant and other animals instead. She had lots of fun just gluing, sticking and then washing all of her toys in a bucket of soapy water afterwards.
So the concept of using a milk bottle and tissue paper to create something is great. Just don’t get too hung up on trying to make the perfect Elmer. Let the children decide what to turn a milk bottle into and they’ll come up with something far better! My 4 year old just loved cutting into the bottle itself.
Hanging up the washing
Come rain or shine, you can always hang out the washing. Good for fine motor skills, number skills , matching colours and patterns and more importantly it helps mummy and daddy!
Paper Aeroplanes
We used GALT Paper Planes pack which makes 10 different paper planes with a step by step guide but there are many instructions online that you can follow too.
Gingerbread Men
A lovely recipe to follow on a rainy day. You can make a whole themed day of it. First we read the story of the Gingerbread Man. Next, we made cardboard masks of the characters and did some role play (or you could make a story map). Then we drew around gingerbread cutters on paper and designed what our gingerbread men would look like. After that, we decided what sweets we’d have for its buttons, eyes etc and then went to the shop to by them! Finally, we made them and decorated them using this recipe: https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/gingerbread_men_99096
Quick Pizza Dough
A quick pizza dough for when you want a pizza in a hurry. The children particularly enjoyed rolling out and shaping the dough. They then chopped up and added their own toppings. Here’s the recipe we used: https://www.sainsburysmagazine.co.uk/recipes/bread/quick-pizza-dough
Writing letters
We were missing our family and friends so decided to write letters to them all. We used the ‘Pressed Flowers’ we did in the Spring to make the front of our cards (see Spring Theme Activities Post) and then wrote our messages inside using our ‘Letters and Sounds’ knowledge and handwriting jingles.
Story Art
Inspired by a children’s story, you could draw an outline of one of the characters, cut up squares of different materials and let them create their own collage
