Learn how to make a DIY snowflake peg board for kids. This is a fun and easy fine motor activity for toddlers and preschoolers this winter.
Laura @inspiremyplay Founder of @inspiremyplay, Early Years teacher for 11 years and mummy to three gorgeous girls. I'm passionate about about the benefits of play in early childhood. This post may contain affiliate links. This means that if you click on a link and go on to make a purchase, I may receive a small commission (at no additional cost to you). Please read my disclosure policy for more details. Are you searching for fun and engaging winter-themed sensory and creative play ideas for your little ones? Look no further! This blog post is filled with easy and interactive activities that are perfect for preschoolers and young children at home or in an early years setting. From exploring winter through touch, sound, and sight, to incorporating winter themes into sensory play, these activities provide opportunities for play-based learning with the aim to support your child’s development. Get ready to have some winter fun with your little ones with these amazing sensory and creative play ideas. Frozen Bubbles This is such a magical experience to do with little ones! If you get a cold morning then it is well worth bracing the weather to blow bubbles and watch them freeze together! This works well when it’s about -2, -3C so as we have cold snap this week why not save this activity to try! Check out our blog post to find out how to do it. Frozen Pom-Poms There really is something magic about freezing things for kids to break free again! Add droppers, warm water, containers & scoops. This is great for fine motor skills and also provides opportunities for colour sorting, maths, exploring freezing and melting and lots more! Please supervise carefully. Pom-poms are a potential choking hazard to small children. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Inspire My Play ® (@inspiremyplay) Snowflake Bubble Foam Bubble foam is always an easy win for us! On this occasion we added some snowflake cookie cutters and my little one loved exploring making and popping the bubbles! To make bubble foam simply mix roughly half a cup of bubble bath and 1 cup of water together in a blender or using a hand mixer. Spoon out the foam into a tray. If there’s any watery liquid left in the bottom give that a whisk too. I also some added scoops and bowls and sequin snowflakes that she enjoyed searching for in the foam! Once the foam disappears you can easily re-whisk it back into a foam. In fact, we actually left this in the tray for a few days then re-whisked it to use today and it was just as good as before! Winter Chickpea Sensory Bin It’s no secret that dried chickpeas are one of our favourite sensory play materials! They are so satisfying to scoop and pour (for grown-ups too!) and are a bit easier to contain than rice and other grains. They also last forever to re-use over and over. You don’t have to colour them, but it makes a fun change and it’s so easy to do! To colour dried chickpeas all you need is a bag or jar, a squirt of ready-mix tempera paint and a lined tray to lay them on to dry. You can find our step by step guide here. The chickpeas dry super quick, but if you’re in a hurry you can put them in the oven on a low heat to dry out for 5 minutes. These winter style ones will be perfect for all our seasonal play. Throw in some bowls and scoops and a poppet is great fun to fill with chickpeas too! You can buy our nesting bowl set here. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Inspire My Play ® (@inspiremyplay) Arctic Small World Thanks to @minimundos_demimundo on Instagram for sharing this polar inspired small world in the PlayTRAY. There’s so much to explore with this one! Save this list of bases to try sometime : Water with blue food colouring Salt Dyed blue salt, Shaving foam, Oobleck (water & cornflour) Baking soda+water (add vinegar for a fizzy reaction!) Ice Art Freezing some water in a shallow tray makes a great canvas for some process art. You can paint on the ice with regular paint, paint sticks, watercolours or dilute some food colouring and drip the colour on using droppers. Each will achieve a slightly different effect. This is a brilliant one for encouraging kids to explore and experiment and a great opportunity for some colour mixing theory too. Iceberg Sensory Bin I realise this small world isn’t geographically accurate but when your 2 year-old insists we need polar bears what can you do? I wanted to share this particular set-up to show tray play doesn’t always have to be messy! My girls had just as much fun making up little stories with this set up. To make the sea we used a batch of dyed dry pasta I used food colouring for this batch but you can find more info and alternative options on a blog post I wrote here. The iceberg is a bit of packaging painted white and I used a bit of felt for the snow. The mountains are triangles of plywood with the tops painted with acrylic paint. Ice Castles Fill containers of different shapes and sizes with water and leave outside on a cold night to freeze. Use the ice like building blocks to create a castle, using shaving foam as cement! To decorate the castles we used droppers to squeeze coloured water over it and also used paintbrushes to paint the ice. This is a messy activity but incredibly fun! If you can, wrap up warm and do it outside. Also, having a bowl of water to clean hands is also handy. Shaving Foam Arctic Small World Whenever the freezer needs clearing of frost I can’t help but want to set up a small world with it! A quick squirt of shaving foam in the bottom of our playTRAY with a tiny bit of blue food colouring swirled in made the sea and then the frost/ice was laid on top. It inevitably gets a bit messy, but actually shaving foam is pretty easy to clean up. A bowl of water nearby to wash hands is useful and children often enjoy the opportunity to do some washing up! The mountains are a quick DIY using plywood and acrylic paint. The majority of our animal figures are from Schleich, which I highly recommend. Shop Schleich Animals (Amazon US) Shop Schleich Animals (Amazon UK) Cotton-Wool Snow For a low mess, easy option for pretend snow try cotton-wool balls! These are really fun to set up with construction vehicles. My littlest loved loading them up and moving them around the tray and clearing the road of snow. Card Puzzles Don’t throw your Christmas cards away just yet! Why not recycle them into some DIY puzzles? Make these as simple or challenging as you like to suit your own child. Or increase the challenge gradually by cutting the pieces in half each time they complete it. Obviously this isn’t just limited to Christmas cards but is a great way of reusing them! The benefits of puzzles are numerous... problem solving, reasoning about shapes, fine motor skills and concentration to make a few. And best of all this activity takes minutes to set up and is totally free. Winter Farm My kids love a small world farm and so I thought I’d make them a wintery version in the PlayTRAY! I also wanted to show you a few quick ways to make fake snow but you could just choose one and use it for the entire tray. Icing sugar and desiccated coconut are super easy ways to make pretend snow. Mixing equal parts shaving foam and baking soda (bicarbonate of soda) is another way we love. You can also switch the shaving foam for white hair conditioner and that works well too (and smells lovely!). We made our frozen elements by sticking the PlayTRAY segments in the freezer. The frozen mud can be made using chocolate pudding mix or by mixing 1 cup of flour, 1/4 cup of cocoa and and 1 cup of water, before putting into the freezer for a few hours. This slowly thawed throughout the day to make a fun, messy place to play! Shop Schleich Farm Animals (Amazon US) Shop Schleich Farm Animals (Amazon UK) Ice Skating Penguins To make skating penguins, fill a muffin tray with water and cover with tinfoil. Snap some craft sticks in half and carefully push them through the tinfoil so they are standing upright in the water. Place in the freezer overnight. In the meantime print and cut out the penguins. If you have a laminator, laminating them will give them better protection from the water. Once the water is frozen, remove the tinfoil and tape the penguins to the sticks. Remove them for the muffin tin and you are ready to play! They will glide easily over the glossy surface of the PlayTRAY lid These dancing penguins are available to download for free on our printables page here. An alternative method would be to freeze animal figures directly in the ice. Winter Woodland Play Dough One of mine & the girls favourite play dough invitations! I made this white play dough using our usual recipe and a generous amount of white icing colouring. Alongside the play dough, I put out some natural loose parts and some little trees. As well as making small worlds this is a lovely one for exploring patterns with the loose parts and making tracks in the play dough with the animals (swipe through to see pics) If you would like more info on our top small world resources check out our blog post about it. Making play dough is one of the activities in our FREE Beginners’ Guide to Sensory Play. You can download it by clicking the button below: Get your FREE ebook For more simple DIY recipes & ideas for sensory play at home download your Beginner's Guide to Sensory Play by subscribing to Inspire My Play today. Get Yours Now DIY Snow We have tried a lot of different ways of making artificial snow and this is by far our favourite! It’s so simple to make combining roughly equal amounts of bicarbonate of soda (baking soda) and shaving foam. It has a great texture and is cool to touch initially, just like snow! If your snow loses it’s ability to form snowballs over time you can revive it by adding a squirt more shaving foam. To fill the PlayTRAY base I used 4 cups of bicarbonate of soda and roughly 4 cups of shaving foam. In the U.K. it is pretty hard to get large bags of bicarbonate of soda in the supermarket but you can pick up KG bags of the stuff cheaply on Amazon (it’s also great for fizzy experiments so worth having a stash in the cupboard). Northern Lights A little twist on the classic nebula jar, we made some Northern Lights jars and it was so much fun! To make the forest scene I cut a piece of adhesive vinyl. If you don’t have vinyl, some black paper will do or you could even paint a forest on the jar using an acrylic paint pen. What you need: • A jar or bottle • Water • Ready mix paint • Cotton wool balls • Bio-glitter • Black paper or vinyl Method 1. Fill your jar about a quarter to a third full of water. 2. Add a generous squirt of paint and some bio glitter and mix. 3. Pull apart or unroll cotton wool balls and place them in the jar. 4. Use a paint brush or similar to press them down into the paint mixture. Keep adding more cotton wool until most of the paint has been absorbed. 5. Now add more water, choose a contrasting colour paint and repeat the process. Continue until you reach the top of the jar before replacing the lid. 6. Cut out a forest silhouette from black vinyl or paper and stick around the bottom of your jar. And that’s it! All mine were able to do this (just help with the forest scene) and each one was unique 🥰. They really are mesmerising to look at! Snow Subtraction Cloud Pom Pom Push I made this one as a visual way to explore subtraction with one of my little ones. The idea was to lay out the pom-poms on the holes and then push through the amount she was subtracting before counting how many were left. I made the cloud into a mini whiteboard with a piece of contact paper/ sticky back plastic over the top and then she was able to record her answer using a chalk pen before wiping it off. For those not ready for subtraction this is still just fun to use as a pom-pom push-it’s a great activity for strengthening little fingers (and they certainly needed it at first with some of these holes!). You could also use this for counting backwards or 1:1 correspondence-say the next number each time you push one through the hole. Winter Light Panel Play Do you own a light panel? This has been a fantastic addition to our play room For this activity I set out a collection of translucent loose parts to make snowflakes. Winter Sensory Bag This winter sensory bag is great for practising a bit of letter formation. Using a sensory approach like this should help children internalise how to form the letter more quickly as well as being more fun and appealing than pen and paper! To make the sensory bag I used hair straighteners to seal three sides of a laminating pouch, added some hair gel, food colouring and some snowflake sequins. I then sealed the final side of the laminating pouch. If you don’t have a laminating pouch or hair straighteners you can easily use a ziplock bag instead. We used ours on a light panel which worked really well but any surface with a contrasting colour would do. Frozen Penguin Eggs Children love to rescue anything frozen! One of the great positives about this activity as it takes the children a long time to do! Here's how to prepare them: 1. Blow up some balloons and let the air out again to stretch them. 2. Place your penguins inside the balloons. This can be a bit tricky but with a bit of patience you can actually get quite large animals inside. 3. Place the balloon over a tap and fill with water. 4. Tie the balloon up and place it in the freezer. Once they are frozen snip off the top of your balloon and it should be easy to peel off. I made a bit of oobleck to put in the bottom of our tray (2 cups of cornflour, 2 cups of water and a drop of food colouring). It’s not necessary but added another sensory element to it and the girls enjoyed playing with the penguins in it afterwards. I gave them spray bottles full with warm water and a little toy hammer to prize open their eggs. The beauty of this is definitely how long it takes- we got a good hours play out of this 😁 Fork Painted Polar Bears Painting with something other than a paintbrush is good fun and fork printing makes great-looking fur! We first made these last year and the girls loved it so much! Feed the Penguin Phonics This DIY game is perfect for practicing letter sounds and words! In this game, I hid the fish with letter sounds written on in a tray of cloud dough- it could easily be rice or anything else- this is just what I already had available to use. This idea was to search through the cloud dough to find the correct sound and then feed it to the penguin. You could easily switch this for words or for little ones posting poms-poms is also lots of fun! To catch the letters as they were fed to the penguin I attached a cardboard box to the back. I also made a hole for his tummy so they could see the contents! This penguin cut out and the fish are available to download here. Bead & Button Snowflakes This is such a calming & mindful process, plus the results are so beautiful! These look lovely hung up on a tree or in a window. All you need are some pipe cleaners to form the snowflake shape and a selection of buttons or beads to thread on. It’s such a great work out for little hands! 🖐 Frozen Play Dough and Wooden People I painted these little Elsa & Anna pegs for the girls to use in their play. I’m definitely not a peg painting expert but it wasn’t that hard to get something resembling the characters by using the right colours! And I think these would make a gorgeous DIY gift. You can check out the blog post here for the full details. Penguin Rescue Place little penguins (or other objects) into a tray or cake tin with water and a bit of food colouring and pop them into the freezer. Once frozen use warm water and a dropper, a spray bottle (because this is always a hit!) to help melt the ice. You can also use a spoon for chipping away at the ice and some tweezers for removing the penguins. I’ve found over the years that this type of activity is usually a winner. It can always be re-frozen and taken out again. Secret Ice Painting Have you tried this before? A little bit of table salt brushed around a cookie cutter or stencil creates a hidden picture on ice, ready to be discovered! We used watered down ready mix paint to reveal the hearts in the ice. You could switch this up for all sorts of themes! You need to be ready to do this activity straight away after prepping before the salt dissolves the ice too much. Either pop a tray of water in the freezer or leave it outside on a cold night to freeze over. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Inspire My Play ® (@inspiremyplay) Arctic Small World Backdrop Try an arctic backdrop for enhancing your small world set ups. We made this particular scene using a cardboard box. To make the icebergs, cut out circles of cardboard that get increasingly smaller. Glue them together and invite the kids to paint them white. You can download our arctic backdrop printable here.
A fun Sparkly Winter 2 Ingredient Play Dough, perfect for sensory play or to a create an invitation to play tray with.
Seven Kindergarten winter activities you can easily setup in your classroom that will transform it into a winter wonderland.
I love the holidays, but I am EXHAUSTED! I’m so over traveling, partying and never ending holiday to do lists and ready to get back into a bit of a routine around here. We had lots of snowy fun this week that I can’t wait to share with you! Here were our plans […]
What's in the snow? Free printable for kids. A great Winter fine motor activity for toddlers and preschoolers.
Easy ice painting bin for preschoolers to explore colors on ice during a winter, snow, or arctic animal theme in the classroom or home preschool!
Laura @inspiremyplay Founder of @inspiremyplay, Early Years teacher for 11 years and mummy to three gorgeous girls. I'm passionate about about the benefits of play in early childhood. This post may contain affiliate links. This means that if you click on a link and go on to make a purchase, I may receive a small commission (at no additional cost to you). Please read my disclosure policy for more details. Are you searching for fun and engaging winter-themed sensory and creative play ideas for your little ones? Look no further! This blog post is filled with easy and interactive activities that are perfect for preschoolers and young children at home or in an early years setting. From exploring winter through touch, sound, and sight, to incorporating winter themes into sensory play, these activities provide opportunities for play-based learning with the aim to support your child’s development. Get ready to have some winter fun with your little ones with these amazing sensory and creative play ideas. Frozen Bubbles This is such a magical experience to do with little ones! If you get a cold morning then it is well worth bracing the weather to blow bubbles and watch them freeze together! This works well when it’s about -2, -3C so as we have cold snap this week why not save this activity to try! Check out our blog post to find out how to do it. Frozen Pom-Poms There really is something magic about freezing things for kids to break free again! Add droppers, warm water, containers & scoops. This is great for fine motor skills and also provides opportunities for colour sorting, maths, exploring freezing and melting and lots more! Please supervise carefully. Pom-poms are a potential choking hazard to small children. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Inspire My Play ® (@inspiremyplay) Snowflake Bubble Foam Bubble foam is always an easy win for us! On this occasion we added some snowflake cookie cutters and my little one loved exploring making and popping the bubbles! To make bubble foam simply mix roughly half a cup of bubble bath and 1 cup of water together in a blender or using a hand mixer. Spoon out the foam into a tray. If there’s any watery liquid left in the bottom give that a whisk too. I also some added scoops and bowls and sequin snowflakes that she enjoyed searching for in the foam! Once the foam disappears you can easily re-whisk it back into a foam. In fact, we actually left this in the tray for a few days then re-whisked it to use today and it was just as good as before! Winter Chickpea Sensory Bin It’s no secret that dried chickpeas are one of our favourite sensory play materials! They are so satisfying to scoop and pour (for grown-ups too!) and are a bit easier to contain than rice and other grains. They also last forever to re-use over and over. You don’t have to colour them, but it makes a fun change and it’s so easy to do! To colour dried chickpeas all you need is a bag or jar, a squirt of ready-mix tempera paint and a lined tray to lay them on to dry. You can find our step by step guide here. The chickpeas dry super quick, but if you’re in a hurry you can put them in the oven on a low heat to dry out for 5 minutes. These winter style ones will be perfect for all our seasonal play. Throw in some bowls and scoops and a poppet is great fun to fill with chickpeas too! You can buy our nesting bowl set here. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Inspire My Play ® (@inspiremyplay) Arctic Small World Thanks to @minimundos_demimundo on Instagram for sharing this polar inspired small world in the PlayTRAY. There’s so much to explore with this one! Save this list of bases to try sometime : Water with blue food colouring Salt Dyed blue salt, Shaving foam, Oobleck (water & cornflour) Baking soda+water (add vinegar for a fizzy reaction!) Ice Art Freezing some water in a shallow tray makes a great canvas for some process art. You can paint on the ice with regular paint, paint sticks, watercolours or dilute some food colouring and drip the colour on using droppers. Each will achieve a slightly different effect. This is a brilliant one for encouraging kids to explore and experiment and a great opportunity for some colour mixing theory too. Iceberg Sensory Bin I realise this small world isn’t geographically accurate but when your 2 year-old insists we need polar bears what can you do? I wanted to share this particular set-up to show tray play doesn’t always have to be messy! My girls had just as much fun making up little stories with this set up. To make the sea we used a batch of dyed dry pasta I used food colouring for this batch but you can find more info and alternative options on a blog post I wrote here. The iceberg is a bit of packaging painted white and I used a bit of felt for the snow. The mountains are triangles of plywood with the tops painted with acrylic paint. Ice Castles Fill containers of different shapes and sizes with water and leave outside on a cold night to freeze. Use the ice like building blocks to create a castle, using shaving foam as cement! To decorate the castles we used droppers to squeeze coloured water over it and also used paintbrushes to paint the ice. This is a messy activity but incredibly fun! If you can, wrap up warm and do it outside. Also, having a bowl of water to clean hands is also handy. Shaving Foam Arctic Small World Whenever the freezer needs clearing of frost I can’t help but want to set up a small world with it! A quick squirt of shaving foam in the bottom of our playTRAY with a tiny bit of blue food colouring swirled in made the sea and then the frost/ice was laid on top. It inevitably gets a bit messy, but actually shaving foam is pretty easy to clean up. A bowl of water nearby to wash hands is useful and children often enjoy the opportunity to do some washing up! The mountains are a quick DIY using plywood and acrylic paint. The majority of our animal figures are from Schleich, which I highly recommend. Shop Schleich Animals (Amazon US) Shop Schleich Animals (Amazon UK) Cotton-Wool Snow For a low mess, easy option for pretend snow try cotton-wool balls! These are really fun to set up with construction vehicles. My littlest loved loading them up and moving them around the tray and clearing the road of snow. Card Puzzles Don’t throw your Christmas cards away just yet! Why not recycle them into some DIY puzzles? Make these as simple or challenging as you like to suit your own child. Or increase the challenge gradually by cutting the pieces in half each time they complete it. Obviously this isn’t just limited to Christmas cards but is a great way of reusing them! The benefits of puzzles are numerous... problem solving, reasoning about shapes, fine motor skills and concentration to make a few. And best of all this activity takes minutes to set up and is totally free. Winter Farm My kids love a small world farm and so I thought I’d make them a wintery version in the PlayTRAY! I also wanted to show you a few quick ways to make fake snow but you could just choose one and use it for the entire tray. Icing sugar and desiccated coconut are super easy ways to make pretend snow. Mixing equal parts shaving foam and baking soda (bicarbonate of soda) is another way we love. You can also switch the shaving foam for white hair conditioner and that works well too (and smells lovely!). We made our frozen elements by sticking the PlayTRAY segments in the freezer. The frozen mud can be made using chocolate pudding mix or by mixing 1 cup of flour, 1/4 cup of cocoa and and 1 cup of water, before putting into the freezer for a few hours. This slowly thawed throughout the day to make a fun, messy place to play! Shop Schleich Farm Animals (Amazon US) Shop Schleich Farm Animals (Amazon UK) Ice Skating Penguins To make skating penguins, fill a muffin tray with water and cover with tinfoil. Snap some craft sticks in half and carefully push them through the tinfoil so they are standing upright in the water. Place in the freezer overnight. In the meantime print and cut out the penguins. If you have a laminator, laminating them will give them better protection from the water. Once the water is frozen, remove the tinfoil and tape the penguins to the sticks. Remove them for the muffin tin and you are ready to play! They will glide easily over the glossy surface of the PlayTRAY lid These dancing penguins are available to download for free on our printables page here. An alternative method would be to freeze animal figures directly in the ice. Winter Woodland Play Dough One of mine & the girls favourite play dough invitations! I made this white play dough using our usual recipe and a generous amount of white icing colouring. Alongside the play dough, I put out some natural loose parts and some little trees. As well as making small worlds this is a lovely one for exploring patterns with the loose parts and making tracks in the play dough with the animals (swipe through to see pics) If you would like more info on our top small world resources check out our blog post about it. Making play dough is one of the activities in our FREE Beginners’ Guide to Sensory Play. You can download it by clicking the button below: Get your FREE ebook For more simple DIY recipes & ideas for sensory play at home download your Beginner's Guide to Sensory Play by subscribing to Inspire My Play today. Get Yours Now DIY Snow We have tried a lot of different ways of making artificial snow and this is by far our favourite! It’s so simple to make combining roughly equal amounts of bicarbonate of soda (baking soda) and shaving foam. It has a great texture and is cool to touch initially, just like snow! If your snow loses it’s ability to form snowballs over time you can revive it by adding a squirt more shaving foam. To fill the PlayTRAY base I used 4 cups of bicarbonate of soda and roughly 4 cups of shaving foam. In the U.K. it is pretty hard to get large bags of bicarbonate of soda in the supermarket but you can pick up KG bags of the stuff cheaply on Amazon (it’s also great for fizzy experiments so worth having a stash in the cupboard). Northern Lights A little twist on the classic nebula jar, we made some Northern Lights jars and it was so much fun! To make the forest scene I cut a piece of adhesive vinyl. If you don’t have vinyl, some black paper will do or you could even paint a forest on the jar using an acrylic paint pen. What you need: • A jar or bottle • Water • Ready mix paint • Cotton wool balls • Bio-glitter • Black paper or vinyl Method 1. Fill your jar about a quarter to a third full of water. 2. Add a generous squirt of paint and some bio glitter and mix. 3. Pull apart or unroll cotton wool balls and place them in the jar. 4. Use a paint brush or similar to press them down into the paint mixture. Keep adding more cotton wool until most of the paint has been absorbed. 5. Now add more water, choose a contrasting colour paint and repeat the process. Continue until you reach the top of the jar before replacing the lid. 6. Cut out a forest silhouette from black vinyl or paper and stick around the bottom of your jar. And that’s it! All mine were able to do this (just help with the forest scene) and each one was unique 🥰. They really are mesmerising to look at! Snow Subtraction Cloud Pom Pom Push I made this one as a visual way to explore subtraction with one of my little ones. The idea was to lay out the pom-poms on the holes and then push through the amount she was subtracting before counting how many were left. I made the cloud into a mini whiteboard with a piece of contact paper/ sticky back plastic over the top and then she was able to record her answer using a chalk pen before wiping it off. For those not ready for subtraction this is still just fun to use as a pom-pom push-it’s a great activity for strengthening little fingers (and they certainly needed it at first with some of these holes!). You could also use this for counting backwards or 1:1 correspondence-say the next number each time you push one through the hole. Winter Light Panel Play Do you own a light panel? This has been a fantastic addition to our play room For this activity I set out a collection of translucent loose parts to make snowflakes. Winter Sensory Bag This winter sensory bag is great for practising a bit of letter formation. Using a sensory approach like this should help children internalise how to form the letter more quickly as well as being more fun and appealing than pen and paper! To make the sensory bag I used hair straighteners to seal three sides of a laminating pouch, added some hair gel, food colouring and some snowflake sequins. I then sealed the final side of the laminating pouch. If you don’t have a laminating pouch or hair straighteners you can easily use a ziplock bag instead. We used ours on a light panel which worked really well but any surface with a contrasting colour would do. Frozen Penguin Eggs Children love to rescue anything frozen! One of the great positives about this activity as it takes the children a long time to do! Here's how to prepare them: 1. Blow up some balloons and let the air out again to stretch them. 2. Place your penguins inside the balloons. This can be a bit tricky but with a bit of patience you can actually get quite large animals inside. 3. Place the balloon over a tap and fill with water. 4. Tie the balloon up and place it in the freezer. Once they are frozen snip off the top of your balloon and it should be easy to peel off. I made a bit of oobleck to put in the bottom of our tray (2 cups of cornflour, 2 cups of water and a drop of food colouring). It’s not necessary but added another sensory element to it and the girls enjoyed playing with the penguins in it afterwards. I gave them spray bottles full with warm water and a little toy hammer to prize open their eggs. The beauty of this is definitely how long it takes- we got a good hours play out of this 😁 Fork Painted Polar Bears Painting with something other than a paintbrush is good fun and fork printing makes great-looking fur! We first made these last year and the girls loved it so much! Feed the Penguin Phonics This DIY game is perfect for practicing letter sounds and words! In this game, I hid the fish with letter sounds written on in a tray of cloud dough- it could easily be rice or anything else- this is just what I already had available to use. This idea was to search through the cloud dough to find the correct sound and then feed it to the penguin. You could easily switch this for words or for little ones posting poms-poms is also lots of fun! To catch the letters as they were fed to the penguin I attached a cardboard box to the back. I also made a hole for his tummy so they could see the contents! This penguin cut out and the fish are available to download here. Bead & Button Snowflakes This is such a calming & mindful process, plus the results are so beautiful! These look lovely hung up on a tree or in a window. All you need are some pipe cleaners to form the snowflake shape and a selection of buttons or beads to thread on. It’s such a great work out for little hands! 🖐 Frozen Play Dough and Wooden People I painted these little Elsa & Anna pegs for the girls to use in their play. I’m definitely not a peg painting expert but it wasn’t that hard to get something resembling the characters by using the right colours! And I think these would make a gorgeous DIY gift. You can check out the blog post here for the full details. Penguin Rescue Place little penguins (or other objects) into a tray or cake tin with water and a bit of food colouring and pop them into the freezer. Once frozen use warm water and a dropper, a spray bottle (because this is always a hit!) to help melt the ice. You can also use a spoon for chipping away at the ice and some tweezers for removing the penguins. I’ve found over the years that this type of activity is usually a winner. It can always be re-frozen and taken out again. Secret Ice Painting Have you tried this before? A little bit of table salt brushed around a cookie cutter or stencil creates a hidden picture on ice, ready to be discovered! We used watered down ready mix paint to reveal the hearts in the ice. You could switch this up for all sorts of themes! You need to be ready to do this activity straight away after prepping before the salt dissolves the ice too much. Either pop a tray of water in the freezer or leave it outside on a cold night to freeze over. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Inspire My Play ® (@inspiremyplay) Arctic Small World Backdrop Try an arctic backdrop for enhancing your small world set ups. We made this particular scene using a cardboard box. To make the icebergs, cut out circles of cardboard that get increasingly smaller. Glue them together and invite the kids to paint them white. You can download our arctic backdrop printable here.
Seven Kindergarten winter activities you can easily setup in your classroom that will transform it into a winter wonderland.
Have fun with these easy winter sensory bottles for kids. Babies, toddlers and preschoolers will love playing with these DIY toys.
Fill winter days and keep the kids entertained with a Winter Magic Watercolor Craft. Watch as winter scenes magically appear beneath their paint brushes.
FREE Snowman shape matching activity perfect for toddlers and preschoolers to learn shapes with a Winter theme.
This week I invite you to join us and host your own Toddler Winter Games! We're combining toddler skills with some of our favorite winter sports activities like curling, bobsledding, and ice hockey and we
This adorable cotton ball penguin craft is easy to make for your preschoolers and kindergartners. There are 4 different penguin templates to choose from!
Do cold days and school closings have your kids indoors more now? Don't worry - you can still save your sanity and have a fun time with your children with these fun winter activities. Be sure to pin the post to save it for your next snow day. Snowflake Stained Glass Mobile by Mama Miss - […]
Snowball Balance is a super easy winter STEM activity for toddlers and preschoolers! A great way to banish boredom on those long cold days!
Marshmallow snowball counting to add to winter counting activities for preschoolers | winter fine motor activities | winter counting activities | teach counting
We watched Happy Feet over the weekend so naturally Madelynn is a bit in love with penguins lately which made it the perfect time for our penguin tot school theme. We did a few of the same penguin activities that we tried last year, but tried lots of new ones too! Here were our […]
Here is a list of 20 creative and fun snowflake activities and crafts for babies, toddlers, preschoolers & kindergartners!
Kids will love decorating indoors with these fun-to-make , easy Icicle Winter craft for kids. These are so PRETTY and fun to make for kids of all ages.
Learn how to make a Snowstorm in a Jar, one of the best science activities for kids. Perfect for winter or weather preschool curriculums.
Preschoolers learn about winter ice lessons through STEAM Stations, art, books, fingerplays and science experiments. Icicles and ice fun! #MGTblogger
Easy winter sensory bin for toddlers, preschoolers, and kindergarten aged kids to work on fine motor skills
These winter movement activities are a great way to get bodies up and active in your house or at school. Movement Activities for Toddlers and Preschoolers that are perfect for brain breaks and gross motor activities. This free Winter Theme printable makes an exciting Gross Motor Activities for Toddlers and Preschoolers
Find over 200 of The Best Preschool Themes and Preschool Lesson Plans, Whether you need ideas for alphabet activities, 100th Day of School. All About Me, Apples, Transportation Theme, Beach theme, Fall Theme, Spring themes, Fall Leaves. Farm, Feelings. Use thematic unit studies to engage children in learning. Themes for Preschool and Kindergarten, Tons of Pre-K activities and Preschool Topics
This polar animals sensory bin is perfect for preschool winter curriculums. Learn about the harsh climate these amazing animals live in.
17 fun hands-on Winter Preschool Activities and no prep worksheets with a focus on math, literacy, and art.
We’ve been busy celebrating the coldest season of the year…snuggling up to read some wonderful winter stories (if you caught our post on Tuesday), playing in the snow (when we are lucky enough to get it), and decorating our home with these fun Winter-Themed Arts + Crafts for Kids! We’ve loved breaking out the glitter, […]
What an awesome start it has been to our Tot Schooling adventures here at Mac-n-Taters. We packed so much fun into these last two weeks learning about winter and snow. Little Miss was so excited to get back into the swing of things after taking a couple weeks off after Christmas and to be honest so was I. Throughout each day we try to do activities in 4-5 different categories: Books, Fine Motor/Trays, Gross Motor, Sensory/Craft/Science, and Fun with Food. Here is a peek at what the last two weeks looked like for our Winter/Snow Theme. We didn’t get to all the activities, but you know what. That’s ok. We had a fun filled couple weeks and that is all that matters. Affiliate links have been added for your convenience. The Snowy Day By Ezra Jack Keats Sneezy the Snowman by Maureen Wright Snowmen at Night by Caralyn Buehner Snowballs By Lois Ehlert The Biggest Snowman Ever by Steven Kroll One Mitten by Kristine O’Connell George Baby Loves Winter by Karen Katz There Was a Cold Lady Who Swallowed Some Snow by Lucille Colandro Snowmen at Play by Caralyn Buehner Cotton Ball Tong/Scoop: Initially I set this activity up as a tong activity, but this still gives Little Miss some trouble and she became easily frustrated so we switched over to a spooning activity tray. I used “wintery” colored containers and a tray I got from the Dollar Tree and an ice cream scoop and set up an invitation to spoon tray. She enjoyed spooning the cotton balls from one container to the other. After a while though it was more fun to just dump the containers from one to the other. Snowman Playdough Invitation To Create: Ever since Christmas, Little Miss LOVES to play with playdough. We typically only use our Melissa and Dough playdough set with some homemade playdough so this was a fun new experience for her. It is absolutely hysterical watching her try to roll balls of playdough. Instead of rolling it between her hands she holds it and her whole body shakes. We will have to keep practicing. I ended up making lots of balls for her and she had fun pressing all the loose parts in it after squishing them into pancakes. Marshmallow Snowman Paint: This activity was so fun for Little Miss. I used a white crayon and drew a snowman outline on a piece of black construction paper. I then took a clothespin and grabbed the marshmallow with it to make a “paintbrush.” I love using different painting mediums. I showed her how to dip her marshmallow in the tempera paint and use it to stamp the snowman. She loved saying the word “stamp” over and over. It soon turned into more of a paintbrush, but the desired effect was achieved. Everytime we do an activity like this I am amazed at how well she stays within the lines or colors/paints only on parts that need painted. Q-tip Snowglobe Painting: This was our first time using q-tips for any type of activity and once again, it was an exciting new tool for Little Miss to use. I drew a snowglobe scene on a piece of construction paper, set up some paint in a bowl and let Little Miss get started adding snow to her snowglobe. I showed her how to use it like a “stamp” and she immediately got to work. We even set the paper aside and she used the remaining paint to paint on the tray. Colored Mitten Matching: I used construction paper and created several sets of matching mittens. I was going to use scrapbook paper, but wanted to make it so that she could noticeably tell the difference and I didn’t want the patterns to distract her. Once she made her matches I encouraged her to hang them up on the string to practice her fine motor skills with the clothespins. I had to help quite a bit with this activity, but other than finding matching shoes to put on, this was her first experience with matching. Snowflake Tape Resist Painting: This activity was fun to put together and I love the end result. I took some painters tape and made some snowflakes on a piece of colored cardstock. Little Miss then got to paint over the tape with white washable tempera paint. Once the paint was dry, I carefully tore back the tape and a beautiful snowflake scene was left. Outside Snow Play/Make Tracks: We had one relatively warm day that made it perfect to go outside and enjoy the snow. We actually had to carry her back inside because she was so obsessed with the snow she didn’t want to come in to eat dinner. She definitely slept great that night. Indoor Snowball Fight: This activity was on repeat throughout the last two weeks. We used large pom poms and had a blast throwing them at each other and Little Miss also liked making piles of them so that she could then kick them all around. Snowman Cup Knockdown: This was another activity on repeat. I used styrofoam cups I got from the Dollar Tree and drew snowman faces on each of them. We would then stack them up and Little Miss would use our pom pom snowballs to knock it down. Her preferred method of knocking down though was throwing the “snowball” off to the side and then using her feet. Whatever works right? She also loved to then stack all the cups on top of one another for clean up. “Shovel” Snow: This activity was great for many reasons. It required her to use concentration in order to get the cotton balls to where she needed them to be. She had to focus and not rush. It was an awesome activity for hand-eye coordination. She used a dustpan and mini broom to “shovel” the cotton balls. I also taped off an area on the floor and had her “shovel” the “snow” into that specific area. Snowball Toss: The laundry hamper we use for Little Miss to put her dirty clothes in is a collapsible white mesh hamper. This worked perfectly to turned into a snowman. We took turns throwing the snowballs into it from different distances. This helped Little Miss practice her throwing skills. Indoor Skating: We took paper plates and “skated” around the house. I held onto her hands as she wasn’t too sure about how unsteady she felt, but when I was holding her hands she had a blast. Snowflake Hop: I taped snowflakes to the floor and she jumped from snowflake to snowflake. She has been on a counting kick lately so each new snowflake she jumped on we counted out loud. Felt Snowman: I created each of the pieces for a snowman felt board and Little Miss put him together over and over again. Bubble Wrap Snowman Craft: We had a ton of different types of bubble wrap laying around from the holiday season. I cut up a small square for her to use to paint a snowman. He turned out so cute and she loved trying to pop all the bubbles afterwards (and during). Handprint Mitten Craft: I am a complete sucker for any type of print craft and I just love this one. It will be so fun to look back on and see how tiny her hands once were. No Mess Snowflake Paint: As much as I love doing messy projects, It is always nice to have those that do not require a ton of toddler clean up. We brought out my handy dandy cake pan with a lid and Little Miss got to shaking it. We used a marble to help paint the snowflake. Paper Plate Emotion Snowmen: Mr. Mac-n-Taters and I have really been noticing how in tune with emotions Little Miss is. She quickly recognizes if one of us is hurting and immediately asks us if we are ok. She gets upset if we are upset. If something is on the tv and its funny she immediately starts laughing. I loved creating these fun emotion snowmen and pretending to be and talking about each of the emotions with her. She was a hoot trying to imitate them. Banana Snowmen: We used bananas, pretzel sticks, and chocolate chips to create ours. Phew. And that was our last two weeks of Winter/Snow Tot School. What a fun play based filled couple of weeks.
If you love winter and snowmen, you'll love this fun melted snowman goo activity perfect for preschoolers, toddlers, and kindergarten kiddos. Let the kids play in the melted snowman goo and have a fun, hands-on sensory experience they will remember all winter long. Goop is a great way to explore the science of states of
This Igloo Craft is easy and fun! Make enough for preschool, kindergarten, scouts, or at home in just about 10 minutes! Free Printable!
Here is a list of 20 creative and fun snowflake activities and crafts for babies, toddlers, preschoolers & kindergartners!
Marshmallow snowball counting to add to winter counting activities for preschoolers | winter fine motor activities | winter counting activities | teach counting
Who needs a brain break??!? Dreary winter days, mean wiggly kids! Grab our free printable winter gross motor cube for an easy, super fun brain break this winter
Seven Kindergarten winter activities you can easily setup in your classroom that will transform it into a winter wonderland.
30 Snowflake activities and crafts for kids. Toddlers and preschoolers will love learning all about snowflakes this Winter.
Indoor winter activity for kids. You don't need real snow for this fun snow themed activity.
Snowball Rescue Sensory Bin is a great fine motor winter activity for toddlers and preschoolers. Rescue the snowballs in this easy activity!
Create a fun and easy snowman sticky wall for your toddler or preschooler! It's a great fine motor winter holiday activity!
Happy New Year everyone! We enjoyed a little break for the holidays but Madelynn has been asking for school every day since Christmas so we are jumping right back into our preschool routine. It has been below zero almost every day this week too so I am glad I had some fun winter themed activities […]
Here are 2 fun ways to set up a winter sensory bin for kids! Both of these ideas are easy to create and make great fine motor activities!
Have fun over the festive season with these amazing DIY Christmas party games for the little ones.
10 winter activities for 2 and 3-year-olds to enjoy at home or with friends. Try these 10 play-based activities with your little one!
Find how to paint a watercolor snowflake with salt. A fun and easy salt painting for winter science and art.
Four super simple snowflake crafts for kids including pom poms and a snowflake mosaic craft plus a FREE template to use to make them.
Winter is a great time to do some STEM for kids! Use a few simple materials and challenge children to create using their imagination and ...
Soft as silk, snow dough lets you bring the snowman making inside! With only 2 ingredients, you may already have everything you need.
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A fun snowman play dough activity for a winter theme in your preschool or pre-k classroom. Make a snowman with white play dough and loose parts.
