Water Play in Winter

Miriam from MakeItGiveIt - Let it Shine blogged here about a great simple water play activity she engaged in with her boys last week.

It reminded me of a fun activity my boys LOVE to do in summer, and being that it was a sunny, yet rather cold day here in the swampy Waikato, I decided we needed to have some water play too!  The great thing about this is the kids generally don't get too wet, so it is ideal to do in winter.

We drag the chalk outside and go mad chalking lots of different designs.  The boys draw roads and general squiggles, and I make bunches of pretty flowers and draw odd demented looking boats, cars and robots.

Once that has been exhausted, I fill up old dishwashing bottles or old plastic water bottles and let them loose squirting water all over their creations and washing them away.  Sometimes I colour the water with food colouring for a bit of extra fun.  Danger Mouse often spends quite a bit of time 'watering' my bunches of flowers and giving the boats water to 'float' in.  Sprat is not that keen on ruining his drawings but is happy to destroy mine and The Girl has only just joined in, and just drinks the water.

The great thing I love about this (apart from it being an activity that is free if you already have chalk and entertains them for ages), is that on a crisp cold day like today they can still get a taste of water play and stay relatively dry, while spending ages outside having a ball!

Confession time.  I went totally snap happy today taking a million photos of Danger Mouse and The Girl only to find out I didn't have the memory card in the camera .... ahem.  By the time that was realised neither of them were too keen anymore and off to play with other things, but I am sure you get the picture with the few I did manage to snap.