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Low cost winter activities to enjoy with your children

Posted at 6:20 AM, Jan 03, 2018
and last updated 2018-01-03 07:23:32-05

It’s winter, it’s cold and most parents can agree: it’s time to let the kids burn off some energy.

After the initial allure of snow disappears there’s always the challenge of how to motivate kids to enjoy the outdoors in the dead of winter.

There’s a number of easy low-cost things to do: build a snowman, a snow fort, or even start a snowball fight. However, after a few days — or even weeks — those activities seem tired.

Here’s two ideas that could change up your child’s routine, and both can be fun for the whole family.

PAINT THE SNOW

This is a simple trick, all you need is some food coloring, spray bottles, or water bottles.

This is ideal for a day that you have some fresh snow, or clean snow to work with — a few drops of food coloring, and you’re off.

There’s no need to be Picasso. You can spray patterns into the snow, or color the snow and move it by hand.

If your kid seems to enjoy it you can even experiment with various kitchen utensils to see what ways they like to create designs: think water bottles with squirt tops, turkey basters, eye droppers, all of the sudden household utensils and items because art supplies!

CREATE YOUR OWN ICE CREAM

Ice cream is inexpensive to make, and kids never seem to mind how cold it is outside when you’re talking about snacks.

If you’ve ever tried to make it by hand you know it takes minimal ingredients: half-and-half, sugar, and vanilla extracts. You also need salt to jumpstart a chemical reaction — if you’re interested in a teachable moment you can learn more about how the chemical reaction helps the ice cream making process, here.

Creating the ice cream is easy. You’ll add your three ingredients into a small pint, or quart-sized bag:

- 1 cup of half and half
- 2 tablespoons of sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract

In a large gallon-sized bag you’ll add snow (or ice cubes if you opt to do this in the summer) and a 1/2 cup of salt. This bag will never touch the sealed bag of ice cream, but instead will be used to cool the bag.

Throw the small (now sealed) bag of ingredients in the larger bag and shake for 5-10 minutes until the smaller bag begins to harden. Once you’re satisfied with the consistency you remove the small bag and enjoy!