This month our kids and Play & Learn Members are all learning about different polar animals with our printable learning games and hands-on PLAYcard activities. I'm excited to share five of the PLAYcard activities here for you!
Activity 1: Skating Friends
The night before playing, freeze water on a baking sheet. When ready to play, slide the animals along the frozen water for some fun pretend play ice skating. Our kids had fun making the animals dance, spin and race across the ice.
Supplies Needed: baking sheet, water, toy arctic animals
Activity 2: Arctic Habitat Diorama
Fill a mixing bowl with ice and water. Have your child dip their hand into the icy water to feel how cold it is. Now fill a Ziplock bag with Crisco. In a separate bag, your child will seal their hand as best as you can. With their hand sealed, they’ll dip their sealed hand into the bag of Crisco. Press the Crisco all around their hand. Now have them dip it into the cold water. This is how blubber helps animals stay warm; the fat.
Supplies Needed: gallon-size Ziplock bags, mixing bowl, ice, water, Crisco
Activity 3: Reindeer Soup
This is all sensory play fun. No Instructions other than to let them PLAY. We filled a bowl with water and supplied them with the Ingredients. You could add anything else you think of. We told them they were making Reindeer Soup. They loved practicing peeling the carrots and mixing. You do not need any or all of it, you can make it your own.
Supplies Needed: carrots, cinnamon sticks, mixing bowl, peeler, water, cute winter snowflakes (we found ours at Michael’s)
Activity 4: Arctic Slime
This one is tons of fun and definitely our girls' favorite! I love this slime recipe so much that we've been making it often. Once you have the supplies, you can start making it with different colors of glue and adding in fun, small bits to theme it. Here are the easy instructions:
Pour the glue into a mixing bowl. Add in the baking soda and contact solution. Stir until you like the consistency.
Supplies Needed: 6 oz. bottle blue glitter Elmer’s glue, 1/2 tsp baking soda, 1 1/2 Tbsp contact solution
Activity 5: Ice Racers
Okay so I'm not gonna lie, this one took us a bit of time to get figured out. Originally I wanted there to be lanes for the racers and sides to the ramp, but who has time for that? I don't. We propped up the large piece of cardboard, added some aluminum foil and made sure there was a bin at the end. This turned out to be a big hit and even our oldest (11) got in on the fun!
The night before, freeze the toy animals in the cupcake tin. I found some cute ocean animal bath toys that we froze that had a penguin and a whale. Set up your cardboard box as a ramp (as shown in the photos). Tape a piece of aluminum foil to the cardboard. Race the animals down the ramp into the shallow bin at the end.
Supplies Needed: Toy animals, Ice Cube Tray, Cupcake Baking Tin, Aluminum Foil, Cardboard, Shallow Bin
I hope you and your kids have the best time making memories together! Each and every month, our Play & Learn Membership includes our brand-new PLAYcards; 20 hands-on activities just like these. As a matter of fact, I pulled these 5 activities for this blog post from our Polar Pals PLAYcards.
Your kids will have a blast learning and playing together. I love knowing that I always have these low-cost, and low-prep activities in my back pocket. I like to set aside some time on the weekend to gather supplies and prep (like you would meal prepping). This helps me to always be ready!
Want more fun activities like this one? Join our Play & Learn Membership! You'll get 20 PLAYcards with fun, new themes every month as well as over 30 learning games for preschool - 5th grade covering everything from the alphabet and learning their numbers to graphing, fractions and complex phonics skills. It's a great way to make learning FUN!
Happy Learning!
Chelsea
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