9 indoor activities for cold and rainy days in Hoppers Crossing
Rain has a way of arriving on the exact morning you promised the park. By nine o'clock the windows have fogged up, the gumboots are still by the front door and someone small wants to know what happens now.
Cold days at home can turn into the best play of the year. The lounge room becomes a stage. The kitchen bench becomes a laboratory. A bedsheet over two dining chairs becomes somewhere else entirely. Here are nine ideas our educators come back to at Lili's Early Learning Centre in Hoppers Crossing, all of them possible with what you already have at home.
Nine indoor activities to try when the weather keeps you in
1. Read together, then let your child tell it back
Bedtime doesn't have to be the only story of the day. Read a favourite book through once, then hand the telling over. Younger children can turn the pages and name what they see. Older ones will happily invent a completely different ending, which is usually better than the original.
Silly voices help. So does acting it out, with cushions standing in for whatever the story needs. If you have run out of books at home, the Wyndham City libraries at Hoppers Crossing, Tarneit and Werribee are a short drive away and free to join.
2. Make music with what is already in the kitchen
Wooden spoons on an upturned saucepan, rice in a sealed container, an empty tissue box with rubber bands stretched across it. Children don't need real instruments to make a band, and the racket has a purpose. Music supports listening and early language, which is why our children take part in regular music and movement sessions.
Try marching around the house to a beat, then stopping dead when the music stops. Ten minutes of that takes the edge off a restless morning.
3. Set up art that has no right answer
Put out paper and a few materials, then step back. Potato stamps, a paper plate turned into a mask, finger painting on a tray, chalk on dark cardboard. What matters is the doing rather than the finished piece on the fridge.
This is the thinking behind the Reggio Emilia influence in our curriculum, where children lead the work and educators follow their interests. You don't need to be artistic to sit alongside your child and have a go.
4. Move the picnic indoors
Push the coffee table aside, spread a blanket on the floor and eat lunch there. Sandwiches cut into triangles, carrot sticks, cheese, whatever fruit is in the bowl. Children who have refused lunch at the table for a week will often eat happily on a blanket, and there are no ants to fight off.
Let your child help set it up. Carrying plates and folding a blanket builds the same independence our educators encourage in the Toddler and Pre-Kinder rooms.
5. Bake something together
Few smells beat baking on a grey Wyndham afternoon. Depending on age, children can pour, stir, count scoops, mash a banana or press cutters into dough. There is real maths hiding in a measuring cup, along with plenty of sensory play when hands go into the mixing bowl.
Banana bread, pikelets and Anzac biscuits all forgive a heavy-handed helper. Expect flour on the floor and factor it in.
6. Open the dress-up box
A cape, a hat, one of your old shirts and a handbag will keep imaginative play going for an hour. Dress-ups let children rehearse the world they see around them, playing at being a vet, a bus driver, a big sister or a shopkeeper.
Add a prop or two and the play deepens. An old phone, a notepad, a cardboard box with a slot cut in it for a shop counter. Role play like this is where children practise taking turns and reading how someone else is feeling.
7. Start a windowsill garden
Being stuck inside doesn't rule out gardening. Plant herbs in old yoghurt tubs, repot a leggy houseplant or sit a carrot top in a saucer of water and watch what happens. Basil, mint and snow peas all grow quickly enough to hold a young child's attention.
Give your child the job of watering and checking for new growth. Noticing small changes over days is exactly the kind of scientific thinking the Early Years Learning Framework describes when it talks about children as confident, involved learners.
8. Turn the kitchen into a laboratory
Drop rocks into a tall glass of water and mark where the level rises. Half fill a bottle with water, add glitter and a squeeze of dish soap, then swirl it into a tornado. Or go with the classic and let bicarb soda and vinegar erupt out of a volcano built from a cardboard tube.
Ask what your child thinks will happen before you start, and again afterwards. That question does more for their learning than any set of instructions. Raising Children Network has more simple experiments if you want a longer list to work through.
9. Put on a show
Clear a corner of the lounge room, hang a sheet behind it and call it a stage. Children can act out a story they know, one they have made up, or a scene from their week. Socks become puppets with a marker and two buttons of paper stuck on.
Sit down and be the audience properly, phone away. Clapping at the end of a very long performance about a lost dinosaur is the whole point.
What a rainy day looks like at Lili's
Weather rarely changes the shape of a day at our centre. Our purpose-built rooms have space for indoor gross motor play, so children still climb and move about when the yard is too wet. Educators set up experiences that follow whatever the children are curious about that morning, whether that turns into a construction corner, a painting table or a group experiment.
Our program draws on the Early Years Learning Framework and the National Quality Framework, with Montessori and Reggio Emilia approaches shaping how our rooms are set up and how our educators plan. Our 3 and 4 year old kindergarten program is delivered by a bachelor qualified early childhood teacher, and every room from the Nursery through to Kinder has its own rhythm suited to that age.
Meals are cooked fresh onsite every day and our menus change with the seasons. You can read more about our rooms and daily routines on our programs page, or see how we approach safety, health and wellbeing across the centre.
Early learning near you in Melbourne's west
Lili's Early Learning Centre is at 645 Sayers Road, Hoppers Crossing, open 7:00am to 6:30pm Monday to Friday. Families travel to us from Hoppers Crossing, Tarneit, Truganina, Werribee, Wyndham Vale and Point Cook.
We are family owned and operated, and the centre is small enough that educators know every child and every family by name.
Common questions about indoor play
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Set up one activity at a time and keep it simple. Reading together, making music with kitchen items, an indoor picnic and baking all work well for children between 18 months and three years. Most toddlers stay with an activity for ten to fifteen minutes, so having two or three ideas ready for the day helps.
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Babies do best with sensory play and close contact. Try a treasure basket of safe household objects with different textures, singing and gentle movement, board books, or supervised water play in a shallow tray on a towel. Talking through what you are doing as you go supports early language.
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We care for children from six weeks to six years across four rooms. The Nursery takes babies from six weeks to 18 months, the Toddler room runs from 18 months to three years, Pre-Kinder covers three to four years, and Kinder is for four to five year olds. Our FAQs page answers the practical questions about enrolment, fees and what to pack.
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Victorian families can access Free Kinder funding for three and four year old kindergarten programs, which reduces or removes the kindergarten fee depending on your enrolment. Details of eligibility are on the Victorian Government kinder page, and we have set out how it applies at our centre on our VIC Free Kinder page. Child Care Subsidy information is here.
Come and see us
If your child would enjoy days like these with other children around them, come and have a look at our rooms. Book a tour online or call us on 03 8580 7112, and bring your questions with you.