If you have snow around you then no doubt it's cold, but on the plus side, the children are probably loving it!  Wrap the children up in coats, hats, scarves and gloves, put on some cosy boots, and they can go out and play while the snow lasts.  Here are some game ideas to play outside in the snow:-

1. Snow Sculpture: Traditionally we build snowmen, but why not build snow animals and other sculptures like snow-castles or a boat?  Help your children to scoop up mounds of snow and sculpt it into a variety of shapes!
2. Animal Tracking: Look out for the footprints of different animals in the snow; birds, cats, dogs, foxes, squirrels, rabbits, deer...even if you live in an urban area you'll be surprised at how many animals wander in the wild!  Look for animal tracks and tell your toddlers all about the creatures that make them.
3. Footprint Art: There's nothing more inviting than pristine snow!  Have your children create a track of snow pictures by trampling through a pristine blanket of snow.
4. Obstacle Course: Build an obstacle course in the snow - draw a line that your toddler must walk 'tightrope' style, draw boxes that they must jump between and build hurdles that they must jump over.
5. Target Practice: Build a snowman then have your toddler pelt him (or is it a her?!) with snowballs.  Get a hat and have your children throw a hat onto its head!

You may be tired of the snow, but there are still plenty of games the children can have fun with outdoors!

So, Christmas is over - how much packaging have you had to dispose of?  Is it just our imagination, or do children's toys seem to come with kilo's of superfluous packaging?  In Germany shoppers are entitled to unpackage goods at the checkout and leave the mess for retailers to dispose of.  That has encouraged manufacturers of all goods to reduce the amount of packaging they use - supermarkets and retailer's simply won't stock overpackaged goods.  We think that's a great idea!

Amazon.com, in the USA, offer over 350 products in 'frustration-free packaging'.  These are the same regular products available as normal, but in an easy-to-open box that is easily recycled and doesn't recquire an additional package to be mailed out in. They work with manufacturers directly so that these goods are never over-packaged off the production line.  There are none of those annoying clips, wires, screws and other protective gizmo's that make it nigh on impossible to extract your children's new toys from their packaging.  It's better for the consumer, better for the environment, and it has to be cheaper for the manufacturer.  What a great idea!  We think Amazon  should extend this to all their markets!

In this cold weather it's understandable that parents don't want to ge too far from the warmth and comfort of home, but don't think this means you have to stay inactive.  It is important that little ones do keep active because its only when they use their bodies to the limit that they begin to understand what they can do by themselves and how to mange their own bodies.  The more practice they get the better they will be, not to mention safer when they are playing and better co-ordinated in general.

There are lots of physical activities you can do at home as long as you clear a bit of space.  Here are a few ideas - but do supervise as some of the activites are a bit adventurous!!

1. Let's Go To Bed. Clear a double bed of its covers, and have a bit of fun bouncing and rolling around on it.  Try head-over-heels in the middle of the bed.  Get your little one to stand with wide open legs and see if they can look through the middle, going upside down!  Try moving round the bed by bouncing on their bottom; or just try walking without falling over!  Make sure you explain that this is a special treat and shouldn't be done when you're not around... but have some fun!
2. Lets Go For A walk. Go for a walk around the house and follow any lines you have on your carpet.  Or throw a skipping rope or some string on the floor and try to tight-rope walk around the place for a while.  Try following the rope while crawling or being an animal!
3. Ball games. Try rolling a blown up beach ball to each other, or kicking it back and forth.  Try using your head too!  The beach ball is lovely and soft and light, so its a good one for indoor use.  Just make sure all valuables are hidden away!
4. Fetch. Throw a little toy into the room and run to get it.  Try it as a race!  Try the game on stairs if you have some.  Throw the small toy up the stairs and you both try and climb to that step to retrive the toy.  Make sure with very little ones you remember to teach them to trun round on the stairs safely and come down carefully.
5. Jumping Jacks. Try doing some different jumps together.  Jump over cushions or toys.  Jump in time with music or while singing nursery rhymes.

Have a safe, fun time!

Board games have been around for centuries, they were enjoyed by ancient Chinese, Egyptian and Mayan cultures, and are enjoyed just as much today!  Most of us don't play games so often, until we have families and our children grow into an age that they enjoy games.

Games for the youngest children focus on improving hand-eye co-ordination, recognising and matching objects (shapes, animals, colours etc.) and on fine motor skills.  Games for 2 - 3 year olds are designed to encourage concentration - children are required to begin learning to take turns in sequence, to improve attention span and to follow simple instructions.  Games for older children encourage further skills such as basic maths and reading, social skills, simple strategy and self-confidence.

Games have a recommended minimum age for their audience, for example games may signal that they are suitable for children aged 3, 4, 5 or 6+.  These recommendations are based on various factors such as danger posed by the playing pieces, the level of understanding required and the skills that should have been acquired in order to begin playing the game.  Just because a game states a recommended age, it doesn't mean that you can't adapt the game for younger children, or create an entirely different game based on the same game contents.  For example, you could play Trivial Persuits with all the family, ask real questions to the adults, but make up easy questions for the children.  You don't need to let on that their questions aren't genuine!  You could use a Monopoly board to make up an entirely different game, moving around the board and maybe just collecting property cards for the properties landed on.  There are also lots of games that toddlers can play with decks of traditional playing cards.

Board games can give hours of fun and as your children grow, just adapt the games to suit them accordingly.  Why not get your old games down from the attic, dust them down, and start playing them with your children today?!

Chalks are inexpensive, safe for toddlers to handle and can be used for a variety of toddler craft ideas.  Chalks come in a variety of vibrant colours and the fact that it is composed from solid particles makes it one of the few writing materials that works really well on black paper.  You can create night pictures, stunning firework scenes and many other patterns and pictures on black and other dark coloured papers.

Chalk can be used to make rubbings, just like wax crayons.  Find a textured surface, inside or out, such as a textured lino floor, a piece of wood, tree bark or patio stones.  Lay a sheet of paper over your surface and rub across the texture.  You will create an image of the texture on the paper.  That in itself is fun, but you can go further and have your little ones use that as a background to draw another picture on top.

Chalks can be used safely outdoors to draw on patios or pavements.  Make road layouts, games, obstacle tracks, mazes or other large scale pictures for your little ones to play with.  It might look messy for a few days after, but the pictures will quickly disappear with a bit of rain.

Many games are too complicated for the youngest toddlers to grasp, but there are plenty of games you can play with a regular pack of playing cards that will introduce the whole gaming concepts to toddlers.  A pack of cards consists of 52 cards and 2 jokers - that's probably too many for most games, but pick out a suitable number of cards for your purposes, based on the capabilities of your little ones.

Pairs is a great game for toddlers.  Select your cards, maybe two suits to match numbers, or perhaps two cards from each suit (8 cards in total) to match suits.  You could just match red cards and black cards.  Lay the cards out face down and, in turns, turn two cards over.  If they match, you keep them.  Toddlers may not understant taking turns but they can play alone as a challenge. Pairs will help develop mental ability, colours and numbers.

Practice counting by taking ten cards from Ace to Ten, shuffle them and have your toddler lay the cards out in order.  This will also help tune their motor skills with careful laying out.

Hi-Lo is a great way to teach values.  Lay ten cards out, face down, in a row.  Turn over the first card, and ask your little one to guess whether the next card will be higher or lower in value than the first.  Then turn the card over and see if they were right.  This will help to develop notions of quantity as well as  reasoning and decision making.

Old Maid is more advanced for little ones.  Take two suits of cards and remove one of the two Queens.  Deal the cards out, and have each player discard any pairs.  In turn, offer your cards, face down, to the player on your left.  That player takes one card and if it matches one of their own they discard the pair.  If not, they keep the card.  Play continues until the losing player is left with the odd Queen!

Play with cards, balancing them to stand them up, lay them into patterns on the floor or lay out lines to use as roads for toy cars.  A pack of cards introduces limitless games helps your little ones practice numbers and many other skills.

Toddlers enjoy actively listening to music; who knows, forging a healthy interest may nurture the pop stars of the future!  From an early age toddlers will enjoy banging or rattling along to music.  Give them a wooden spoon and a saucepan, or make a rattle out of a tube!   Tape a double layer of greaseproof paper over one end of a toilet or kitchen roll tube, pour in some dry lentils or pasta, and seal the other end with greaseproof paper too.  Watch and listen to your toddlers make noise along with a song they know - they'll quickly pick up surprisingly good tempo and rhythm!

Singing with Toddlers is also a lot of fun and imparts a wide range of benefit.  Many children's songs teach counting and the ABC song helps to teach the alphabet.  All songs simply help to grow memory and creativity as children absorb and learn them very quickly.  You'll find that they can sing a song and make it sound pretty accurate even before they can speak or understand the words!  As their vocabulary and understanding grows, so the words fall into place.  You too can make up new verses to simple rhymes - make up songs about your child and include their name and you'll quickly have them in uncontrollable laughter!

You'll probably find toddler music groups in your local area.  These are not aimed at teaching musical instruments but an introduction to sound and movement.  Toddler music groups are a lot of fun - if you don't have one locally, why not start one and introduce simple movement and banging and rattling improvised percussion?

Wooden toys are all the rage again as fast growing oriental woods are rapidly replacing increasingly expensive, oil derived plastics, but they come at a premium, so why not look to make your own woooden toys?  Small wooden toys have become inexpensive over the last few years, but large dolls houses, hobby horses, rocking horses and wendy houses understandably demand a high premium.  Surprisingly, if you are at all into DIY, these need not be difficult to build yourself.  Your local hardware store, or out of town hardware depot, will have all the materials you need.

You don't need to learn how to cut old fashioned dovetail joints, how to whittle fancy posts, or how to fashion intricate parts.  Modern materials and design give you lots of fixings, premoulded parts and off the shelf pieces that make large woodworking projects much more manageable than they would have been 20 years ago!  Adhesives and paints have also come on a long way to give you non-toxic and weatherproof finishes.

Soft furnishings, fabrics and the like remain expensive, but as the cost of clothes has tumbled in recent years, it's not completely silly to look at buying new garments to turn into soft furnishings for your constructions or just for the teddy bears!

If you don't fancy designing your project yourself, there are plenty of books that will give you plans and instructions for projects for children's toys, soft furninshings and large constructions.  In a world where we look to buy everything and have it delivered to our door, it's easy to overlook just how much fun can be had in creating your own work, and how rewarding too!

When you were a teenager, you probably had no idea what career you wanted to pursue, yet ask your toddlers, and they know already...nurse, train driver, pilot, doctor, police officer, spaceman?!  Your local toy shops undoubtedly stock a great range of dressing up outfits, and toddlers love nothing more than dressing up as superheroes, fairies, princesses or professionals.  You don't have to go to the expense of buying expensive clothes for your kids to enjoy dressing up in.  Tucked away in your wardrobe, you probably have some clothes that you haven't worn in a long time, and most likely have no intention of wearing again?!  Why not turn these into some fun dressing up outfits for your children.  Some of them may not resemble any outfit that they might want to wear, but they'll simply love that it's a garment that you used to wear - it's not important that it isn't a superhero costume or fairy outfit, all that matters is that they can dress up like mommy and daddy!

Some garments that you're willing to pass down to the next generation might be adapted into fun outfits with just a small amount of work.  Do you have brightly coloured clothes that could might be turned into a pirate outfit?  Old white T-shirts that could be turned into a doctor or nurse outfit with just a few accessories drawn on with fabric pen?  ...or maybe some garments that could literally be cut into shreds and sewn onto a T-shirt to create Peter Pan, Robinson Crusoe or even a fairy costume?  Just a small amount of talent and a little bit of imagination can go a long way, and your kids will simply adore a good box of clothes to dress in and take on new personalities!

Babies grow through an established pattern of play as they become toddlers: can you identify the different stages in your children?  There are five stages that children grow through as they develop:-

Solitary play: The youngest toddlers play very much on their own ignoring other children playing around them.  They can be totally caught up in their world and oblivious to what else is goin on in their immediate surroundings.

Observer: At this stage, children are looking at other children playing around them.  This is a fascinating stage because if you watch your child, you can see them looking at and taking in what other children are doing.  You can almost hear their thought processes as they analyse what others are doing so that they might learn from the experience of others.

Parallel play: During this stage children play amongst a group of children but without direct interaction.  They may share their toys, swapping colouring pens, different trucks or dolls, but they are not playing together.  Children at this stage are aware of each other but they are not interacting together.

Associative play: At this stage, children begin to play together but in a loose sense rather than by organising games together.  They interact but they don't have an overall game plan.  You'll see children chasing around a playground following each other but in a disorganised way.  It doesn't spoil the game if children drop out because there's no overall structure to their play.

Cooperative play: The final development stage emerges between 3 - 4 years and sees children playing together,  creating organised make-believe  games such as doctors and nurses, mommy's and daddy's or teachers.  They take on different roles and play out full scenarios.

The ages at which children pass through the different stages varies according to the way that they develop.  The pattern can be changed by their surroundings - for example, children with older siblings will be introduced to cooperative play sooner than their cohorts at nursery, and single children will have less opportunity to experience play with other children unless they attend nursery.

Whilst our baby's have a few toys that were never conceived in our childhood, a surprising number of toys and games that we are familiar with were evident in Roman times! Because Roman toys were made fro m perishable materials such as wood and clay, few have survived to the present, but archaeologists have pieced together Roman childhood from what remains have been discovered as well as depicitions in art and from writings that have survived.

Roman babies enjoyed rattles; toddlers played with dolls and animals fashioned from wood, wax and clay.  Older children enjoyed many boardgames that are still played today such as Tic Tac Toe, Chess, Backgammon and Checkers.  Despite its Latin name, Ludo is a more recent invention!

Outdoors, Roman children would play with go-carts, little chariots pulled by pet dogs, scooters, hoops, see-saws and swings.  They would play marbles using nuts, and used small bones to play a game similar to Jacks.  Just like today, many toys from Roman times fulfilled the dual role of entertaining whilst educating.

I wonder how many toys that our children play with today will still be recognised in 2,000 years from now?!

Just as your kids are beginning to place where their house is when they return from journeys out, suddenly they begin to discover that the world is made up of lots of different countries with different people speak different languages.  Not exactly an easy idea to grasp!  Having an understanding of the world and the diversity of people and language is an important aspect of early education.

Just as kids learn their immediate surroundings through their senses, so you can teach about the world by appealing to their senses too.

Introduce the concept of language through sound - talking and hearing.  If you're lucky, you might be fluent in more than one language, but even if you're not, you probably know some basic words such as 'Hello' and 'Thank You', and maybe some numbers, in a number of languages?  Talk about language and explain how people say these words in different countries.  Explain how even people in the English-speaking world talk in different voices and use slightly different words in certain circumstances.

You can have a lot of fun explaining about different foods from round the world as you introduce basic foods from different countries.  Rice, pasta, pizza and different breads come from different countries.  You can readily buy fruit and vegetables from countries around the world.  If your children are adventurous eaters then try them with simple Chinese, Mexican, Italian, Thai, Indian and other cultural dishes!

Teach geography and sense of distance by playing games.  Create a representation of each continent on pieces of paper and spread them around a large room, or better still, the garden.  Locate the continents in roughly the way that they are laid out across the globe - Asia, Australasia, North America, South America and Europe.  Then simply shout out 'Swim to North America' and have them perform swimming strokes as they run over to North America!

Learning about the world is so important for our little ones, and there are so many games and activities that we can play to foster a desire to learn.

When we were kids, batteries lasted 5 minutes, and they would leak if left unused  for any length of time - luckily both electronics and batteries have improved since then and dead batteries are far less common than in our childhood!  There's still a baffling choice available when it comes to buying batteries, with some lasting better than others.

Rechargeable batteries are more expensive than single use ones, but they can be recharged between 100 and 1,000 times.  In the long run they represent better value for money, and lead to fewer regular batteries being discarded in waste.  The two most common types of rechargeable battery are Nickel Cadmium (NiCd) and Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH).  Always choose batteries with NiMH on the packet - they don't suffer 'memory effect' and don't lose nearly as much charge whilst not being used.  Also look at the power rating on the packet which is expressed as a number of 'mAH'.  The higher this is, the better!  For AA batteries look for a rating of 2,000 mAh or higher, for AAA batteries, choose 1,000 mAh or above.  The higher this rating, the longer the battery will last between charges.

Some toys specifically state that rechargeable batteries are not suited to them.  There could be a genuine reason for this because rechargeable batteries offer lower voltages than disposable batteries.  AA and AAA disposable batteries are 1.5v, but rechargable ones are 1.2v.  This means that rechargeable batteries may not deliver the voltage required for your toys.  The voltage delivered by all battery types gets lower as the battery is used, and high-drain toys require higher voltages to run properly.  As a general rule, toys that have moving parts driven by motors will consume the most electricity.  There's no harm in trying rechargeable batteries - if they work, they work!

If you do have to go for disposable batteries, buy alkaline batteries rather than zinc based ones - the packaging should state 'Alkaline'.  Non-alkaline batteries have a poorer shelf life as they discharge whilst not being used, so the longer they have been sat in the shop, the less power you're taking home with you!

Disposing of any battery type in regular waste is damaging to the environment as they all contain harmful metals that should not end up in landfill.  All batteries should be taken to waste collection points or recycling depots - they may not be recycled, but they will be disposed of safely.  In the EU, any store that sells batteries is now required by law to accept old batteries for recycling under electronic waste (WEEE) regulations.

Having a routine helps your young children understand where they are in the day, and bath time is an important signal that it's almost time for bed. At the end of the day, babies and toddlers may be tired and almost looking forward to sleep, but it can also be a stressfull time for you if they are over tired and become uncontrolled, running away from you and making the bath routine a physical drain on you!  Try to avoid conflict at this stage of the day, the last thing you want to do is wind up the children so that they don't go to sleep when needed.  Instead, try to make bath time a relaxing time and use it to calm them down.

There are plenty of bubble and smelly products formulated specially for children's gentle skin that can be added to the bath.  Encourage them to play with the water because water can soothe them and calm them.   There are plenty of toys designed for the bath, but don't be afraid of using anything waterproof such as plastic bottles, plastic pots and even some of their regular toys so long as they won't trap water inside and spoil.

Encourage your children to think about what will sink and what will float, and have them pour water to learn about the way that water behaves.  Pour water from one cup, bowl or bottle to another, to learn about volume, about what holds most water, and what happens to water when it overflows.  These are all important lessons as they grow up.  Children can often entertain themselves for considerable periods in the bath simply by experimenting, and it's all learning play for them, giving them a thorough understanding of the many properties of water.  Why not introduce some ice to their play?  ...not so much that it makes the water too cold, but a couple of blocks so that they can see it melt, and learn that ice melts to water.  Water is a strange substance, one that we take so much for granted, but a substance that has so much to teach your growing toddlers.

There are times when you want a game that will occupy the children for a few minutes, and 'I spy...' has to be one of the best loved!  The game probably originated in the USA in the early 20th century, and its original form is:-

I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with... [and the player names a letter]

Everyone else then has to guess what the object is.  You can play variants of this game with younger children who don't yet know their alphabet.  Here are our favorite variations:-

I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with... [followed by the sound of the start of the word, but not necessarily a letter, eg. 'Cl' for 'Clock']

...or colors:-

I spy, with my little eye, something that is... [followed by a color, eg. green, for a green tree]

...or sounds:-

I hear, with my little ear, something that goes... [and mimic a noise, eg. 'tick tock' for a clock]

This is a great little learning game that helps to learn colours, sounds or letters, and the kids love it!  It's great to keep kids entertained in confined spaces, such as on a journey, or in a restaurant, and it's fun to play with the whole family.  Do you play any other variants of 'I spy...' that you can share with everyone?