Activities for Your Winter School Vacation

If you’re looking for ways to keep kids busy and learning over wintry days at home, we have you covered! Here’s a collection of activities from Farm field trips and our book, Cultivating Joy & Wonder: Educating for Sustainability in Early Childhood through Nature, Food, & Community, to enjoy with kids both indoors and outdoors:

Signs in the Snow At Shelburne Farms, we turn the Education Center into an indoor forest to learn about tracking animals. Once they've got the basics, the students head outdoors to look for signs of animals and put their new-found detective skills to work. At home, you can practice indoors, too, or just head outside and use our tools to read the stories of the animals in your community.

Butter Making – Shake it, Shake it, Shake it! Making butter at home is a lot easier than you may think, and watching heavy cream go from liquid to solid in the blink of an eye never gets old! Spread it on bread and enjoy right away, or make a quick compound butter by incorporating fresh herbs, fruits, or even mixing in honey.

Pizza: From Farm to You On our fall field trip called Farm to You, students from kindergarten to fifth grade make pizza from scratch. In four hours, four groups make different parts of the pizza: dough for crust, tomato sauce, cheese, and toppings. You can spread the four-part process out over the course of the day at home, and celebrate with homemade pizza for dinner!

Paper Making Show your kids that paper really does come from trees! On a hike in the woods with kids (or if that’s not possible, go out on your own) find a dead, rotting tree. Try to crumble the inner tree with your hands. If you end up with a handful of a crumbly mass of fibers, you have the main ingredient to make paper.

Ice Treasures With its colder temperatures and snow, winter is a great time to create “ice treasure.” Even if you don’t have snow on the ground, kids enjoy making ice treasures and hiding and finding them outside.