Winter Activities for Seniors: 8 Ideas with Free Large Print Printables

Winter keeps a lot of people indoors, and the afternoons are long. A few good printables — large print, easy to read, with answers — make it simple to plan something for one person at the kitchen table or for a whole room. Here are eight winter activities for seniors, at home, in care homes and in community groups, each with a free page you can print today.

In short: print large print winter word searches, play winter bingo as a group, solve cryptograms that hide lines from classic winter poems and then read the poems aloud, color six-sided mandalas, and use the winter birds puzzle to start a bird-watching hour. Everything below is in our free winter printables — 93 pages, answers included, no sign-up.

1. Large print winter word searches

Word searches are the easiest activity to hand out: everyone knows how they work, and nobody needs help to start.

The winter set has ten large print puzzles — snow day, winter animals, cozy at home, winter sports, winter weather, ice and snow, winter clothes, winter birds, New Year's Eve and New Year wishes. Each is a 12 × 12 grid with 12 words in big letters, and the answers are at the back. For more on what makes a puzzle easy to read, see large print word search for seniors; for year-round themes there are more large print word searches.

2. Winter bingo for a group

Bingo works for any group size and needs only a caller. The winter bingo cards are 30 different 5 × 5 cards with winter words — snowflake, cocoa, mittens, sled, polar bear — and a caller sheet to tick as you go.

• Print one card per player on card stock, or slip them into sheet protectors and use dry-erase markers.
• Read each word slowly and say it twice; ticking the caller sheet means you can check a winning card in seconds.
• Small prizes are optional — a turn to call the next game works well.

For more ways to run it, see how to make bingo cards; for other themes, see all printable bingo cards.

3. Poem cryptograms, then read the poem

A cryptogram swaps every letter for another, and you crack the code to reveal a line of text. The winter set hides lines from classic poems by Christina Rossetti, Shelley, Shakespeare, Robert Burns, Tennyson, Emerson and others, all in the public domain.

Once the line is solved, read the whole poem aloud. "In the Bleak Midwinter" and "Auld Lang Syne" are short, many people know them, and they make good conversation starters. The cryptograms are in large print with a letter key under each puzzle; more are in the printable cryptograms.

4. Winter mandala coloring

Coloring is a quiet activity that needs no instructions. The winter set has ten mandala pages: six-sided designs that look like snowflakes, round ones, and designs inside a star, moon, cloud, owl and cozy house — one per page, so there is space to color without bleeding through. Colored pencils work better than markers on plain printer paper. More designs are in the printable mandalas.

5. A bird-watching hour

Print the winter birds word search — chickadee, junco, blue jay, finch, nuthatch, sparrow, wren — and solve it near a window with a feeder. Then keep a simple tally of which birds actually visit. It turns a puzzle into an afternoon.

6. A snow day word list

Give everyone a blank sheet and five minutes to write as many winter words as they can. Compare the lists, and see which words are on the printed word searches. It works well as a warm-up before a puzzle or bingo session.

7. New Year wishes

In late December and early January, the New Year's Eve and New Year wishes word searches lead naturally into a conversation: what was good about the past year, and what would each person like for the next one? Write a few answers on a card and keep it for next year.

8. Make your own puzzle with the group's words

Ask the group for twelve winter words that mean something to them — a town, a family tradition, a favourite winter food — and turn them into a word search with the free word search maker. Choose large print and print a copy for everyone. A puzzle made from the group's own words is often the one people keep.

Printing tips for large print pages

• Paper: US Letter at actual size, or A4 with "Fit" selected.
• Contrast: everything is black on white; print in black ink only for the sharpest letters.
• Pens: a soft pencil or a felt-tip pen is easier to see than a ballpoint.
• Answers: they are always at the back of each PDF — print them separately if you hand out pages.
• Card stock or sheet protectors let you reuse bingo cards and word searches with dry-erase markers.

Where to get the printables

Everything in this article is in the free winter printables: ten large print word searches, 30 winter bingo cards with a caller sheet, mazes, dot-to-dot pictures, ten mandala coloring pages and ten poem cryptograms — 93 pages with answers. Download one set or every page in one PDF. They are free to print for home, care-home, library and community-group use; no account or email is needed.