Seasonal Activities
What to do when it is pouring, freezing, boiling, or the holidays have four days left and everyone has run out of ideas.
Activities
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Five Ways to Decorate an Egg With No Dye
Stickers, felt tips, wool, tissue paper and tape. All five work on a hard-boiled egg and none of them stain anything.
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Weave a Spider Web
Snip notches round a paper plate, wind wool across it, and you have a web. Good threading practice hiding inside a Halloween craft.
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Monster Feet Painting
Paint the bottom of their feet and walk them down a roll of paper. Messy, hilarious, and over in ten minutes.
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Spooky Shadow Puppets
Cut a bat and a cat from card, tape them to straws, and put on a show against the wall with a torch.
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Count the Pumpkin Seeds
Wash and dry the seeds from your pumpkin, then turn them into a counting game that lasts all week.
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Draw Round Their Hand and Keep It
One sheet, once a year: their hand, their height, and three things they can do now that they could not last year.
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Handprint Turkeys for the Table
Draw round their hand, turn it into a turkey, write a name on it. Everyone gets one at their place.
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A Countdown Chain
One paper loop per day, torn off each morning. It makes waiting visible, which is what small children need.
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Print Hearts With a Cardboard Tube
Squash a kitchen roll tube into a heart shape and use it as a stamp. One tube makes forty hearts.
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Real Kitchen Jobs a Small Child Can Actually Do
Washing, tearing, stirring and sprinkling. Eight jobs that are genuinely useful on a busy cooking day.
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A Post Box for Kind Notes
A cereal box with a slot cut in it. Everyone posts a note about somebody else, and you read them out at dinner.
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The Hour After School Is Always the Hardest
A child who held it together all day falls apart the moment they see you. Food first, questions much later.
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The Shape of a Rainy Day
A whole day indoors needs a shape, not a list. Energy first, then absorbing, then quiet, then food — repeated.
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The First Cold Morning
A seasonal story about the morning you can suddenly see your own breath.
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An Egg Hunt That Works for Every Age
The same hunt, three difficulty levels, so a two-year-old and a seven-year-old can play together without either being bored.
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Collect the Leaves, Then Sort Them
A bag, a walk, and a kitchen table. The collecting is half of it and the sorting is the other half.
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Scooping Out a Pumpkin
The insides are the best part. Scooping is a proper sensory activity, and the washed seeds do a week of counting afterwards.
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A Thankful Tree
A branch in a jar and a paper leaf each day. Small, slow, and it ends up being the thing everyone reads at the table.
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Winter Play When It Is Too Cold to Go Out
Ice, torches, dens and paper snowflakes. The four things that reliably fill a dark afternoon.
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Noisy Shakers and a Jar of Good Things
One loud activity and one quiet one. Make shakers for the countdown, and a jar to look back at next year.
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Practising the Bits That Actually Worry Them
Not the alphabet — the lunchbox, the buttons, the shoes and finding the toilet. The things that decide whether a first week goes well.
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Painting With Water
A bucket of water and a big brush. They paint the wall, the fence and the path, it dries, and they do it again. No mess at all.
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Rescue the Frozen Toys
Freeze small toys in a tub of water overnight, then hand over warm water, salt and a spoon. It buys a genuinely quiet hour.
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Printing Your Own Wrapping Paper
A halved potato, a shape cut into it, and a roll of plain paper. It looks far better than it has any right to.
Browse seasonal activities
Seasons change what is possible more than anything else. In July you want a reason to be outside and slightly wet; in January you want something that works in a small room without breaking anything.
These pages follow the year — the weather, the school holidays and the handful of celebrations most families mark — so the ideas suit the week you are actually in.
What you'll find here
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Rainy days
Indoor activities with enough going on to survive a whole afternoon, including a few that use up energy without needing a garden.
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Summer and outdoors
Water play, garden science and messy things that are much easier to clear up when they happen outside.
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Holidays and celebrations
Making, decorating and giving — the kind of thing that fills an afternoon and produces something worth keeping.
Bookmark the season you are in — these pages are updated as the year moves rather than replaced.