Tot Tuesday: Unplugged Play

Tot Tuesday is a weekly feature where I highlight a special kids activity, frugal recipe for kids, kids tutorial, etc.

Finding Kids Activities in the winter time can be a real chore. Luckily, here in Texas, we have pretty mild winters. It still can get pretty cold though! With very young children, we are stuck indoors a lot. I purchased a book a few years back called Unplugged Play. It’s a great book with plenty of awesome ideas for entertaining children ages 12 months to 10 years old! I have so many of these pages bookmarked and dog eared, and I thought it would be really great if I could share some of our favorite family activities with all of you!

Now, this book does go up to 10 years old. My little ones are 3 1/2 and 1 1/2, so we’re pretty much only playing through the front half of the book. A lot of the suggestions seem obvious, but I’d be lying if I said that the idea of playing Simon Says with my 3 year old naturally occured to me! I hope these ideas can help you out this winter when you are scratching your head trying to find some unplugged play!

Activities:

• Make a mailbox out of an old shoebox and junk mail
• Teddy Bear Picnic
• Kitchen Table Fort
• Macaroni Mix Up-take various shapes of pasta (uncooked) and combine them in a big bowl…have the child group like pastas together
• Sticker Sorter-Buy some color dot stickers and have your child place different stickers on different catagories of food in your pantry. For instance, green stickers on canned green veggies, blue dots on big cans and red dots on small cans, or yellow dots on their favorite foods!

Crafts:

• Make a collage with torn paper
• Create a puppet on a stick using a paper plate, wooden paint sticks (or crafting sticks), glue, yarn (for hair), etc
• Paint Blot Magic-Fold paper in half and have child paint on one side…fold in half to show the child how the paint transfers to the other side
• Lunchbag puppets

Recipes:

• To make your own glue:
  • 1/3 cup all purpose flour
  • 2 tablespoons sugar
  • 1 cup water

Mix the flour and sugar together in a small pan. Pour the water in slowly, mixing as you pour. Cook over low heat. Let cool before use.

• My recipe for Play Dough

I hope that these little activities, crafts and recipes can help you when you are needing some unplugged play! What do you do with your children when it’s too cold outside? What are your favorite cold weather ideas? Share them in the comments!

This is not a book review or even a book advertisement, it’s simply a book I like. We purchased the book years ago, I was not provided any compensation to write this post. The link to Amazon is an affiliate link, but I am not in any way trying to get you to buy the book. It is a great book though!