Minecraft Day

If you've been reading my blog for a while you might remember that one of the things I like to do with the children in the holidays is to hold a Themed Day. This is a day where we choose a theme, and I come up with some crafts and activities related to that theme to entertain the children. It's been a while since our last one but the children are always asking for another, so we have a couple planned for the summer. Now the children are old enough to choose their own themes, and so Mia chose Minecraft Day and Harry chose Egyptian Day, which will be taking place in a couple of weeks. You can find links to our previous themed days at the bottom of this post.

Now when it comes to Minecraft Day, the obvious activity for the day is to play Minecraft. If I let them I think that the children would quite happily play Minecraft all day, so I was keen to come up with some other things to do that would keep them away from the screen! In the past I've always set up the table in the kitchen with some themed bits and pieces. I've been working quite a lot in the evenings lately and so I wasn't going to bother this time, but Harry asked me specifically whether I was going to as I was putting him to bed, so how could I refuse! I just piled up a few paper crafted blocks (more on those later) and some toys and books that were lying about, and put these cool Minecraft sunglasses that he got free with a magazine onto one of Mia's teddies.

We did start off by loading up the game. I found a brilliant Minecraft scavenger hunt that I could print out. The children can play Minecraft together from their different computers so they worked together to try and find all the items on the list and place them into a treasure chest. This actually took them a lot longer than I expected and they didn't manage to complete it during the day so it will keep them busy for ages, and they absolutely loved it! It was a completely new idea to them and I was really pleased with how much they enjoyed it, I need to do some research and come up with some more hunts for them to do together!

Then we turned off the computer and set to making some Minecraft biscuits. I have a very basic recipe for shortbread that I've been making for the children for years, all the way back to those very first iced biscuits. The difference was that this time Harry was able to measure out all the ingredients himself, much easier for me! We don't have a square cookie cutter so he used a knife to cut out some squares. When they had cooled we iced them with bright green icing (gel colours work best for this) and topped with green sprinkles.

After lunch we moved onto some quiet activities. I already mentioned the papercrafting - Harry has been given some fab Minecraft paper crafting activity sets. The sets come with lots of pre-cut printed shapes that you can pop out and assemble. Some, like the blocks, are very easy, and others are a bit more challenging. He's built some of them but has plenty left to go. He spent ages making some up, and then Mia played with them. We also found some printable Minecraft paper crafting on the Twinkl website which are available for subscribers. The Simple Adventurer Paper Model really was very simple and Mia could put him together easily. The Block Pig Paper Model is also very sweet, and Twinkl has a wide range of other Minecraft based paper crafting projects, including lots of different types of blocks.

Also from Twinkl the children enjoyed the Block Adventurer Addition Mosaic Activity Sheets, and there are subtraction sheets too. Also a Platinum Plus subscription resource, they are a grid of sums, and when you colour in the squares according to the answers a picture is revealed. There are also lots of free Minecraft colouring pages readily available online.

Then we had a long session of play with some of our Minecraft Lego sets. Harry has a few of these that are kept in a separate box to the rest of the Lego (I'm a bit obsessive when it comes to organising the Lego!) so they were able to spread the pieces out all over the floor and Harry concentrated on building the sets while Mia took the little figures out and played with those.

Finally I let them back onto the computers. I wanted to give their play a little structure so I downloaded this free Minecraft Challenge printable. It's January themed so the ideas are all winter and snowy related, but that didn't matter to the children! They had fun coming up with some new builds, and then they had another go at their Minecraft scavenger hunt.

When I was researching Minecraft build ideas I didn't find as many as I was expecting, so I'm going to ask the children to help me to come up with some different ideas that we can share on the blog to inspire other Minecrafters!

We really enjoyed our Minecraft day, it reminded me how much the children do love our themed days, I definitely need to plan a few more before they get too old!

For some more Minecraft themed ideas you might like my post with some Ideas for a Minecraft Themed Party. I also have a post with some tips on How to hold a themed day for children. And if you have a Minecraft player in the family you might enjoy my list of gift ideas for a Minecraft fan.

Our themed days so far:

Space Day
Antarctic Day
Dinosaur Day
Under the Sea Day
Beach Day
Disney Frozen Day (a guest post from my sister)
Roman Day
Transport Day
Australia Day

I have been provided with a Platinum Plus subscription to Twinkl in exchange for sharing their resources on my blog from time to time.