This is a fun project for a boring winter day... building a snowman inside while staying nice and warm and dry!
I made it with my 2-year-old and she had a lot of fun helping me glue everything down. I guided her hand to draw the arms, then she put her hand on mine while I painted on the snowflakes.
It's a forgiving project with lots of room to customize. You can even make it on a slightly smaller scale and put it on the front of a folded piece of construction paper to make a greeting card, or you could cut out the middle of the top snowball and put your child's picture in there... the possibilities are limited only by your imagination and supplies on hand!
What you need:
Cut from construction paper (use my photo as a guide for proportions):
- Three white circles, one large, one medium, one small
- One black rectangle for the top of the hat
- One narrow black rectangle for the brim of the hat
- One narrow red (or other color) rectangle for the band around the hat
- Three red (or other color) long, narrow rectangles for the scarf
- Six small black circles for eyes and mouth, or draw them on (I cut mine freehand, if I were to do it again, I would use a hole punch-- small circles are harder to cut than you might think!)
- Three slightly bigger black circles for buttons, or use the same size as the facial features, or use real buttons
- One small sliver of orange for a "carrot" nose
Other items:
- One whole sheet of construction paper for background (I used blue)
- Marker for drawing arms, or find a couple small twigs outside (I almost used grape stems on this one, but couldn't find two pieces that matched enough for my liking)
- White paint for making snowflakes (I used a white correction pen, LOL)
- Cotton balls for snow, optional
- Glue
What you do:
- Glue the three white circles onto the paper in the traditional snowman shape, or get crazy and stack the snowballs in a creative way.
- Glue the hat together by gluing the red band onto the bottom edge of the larger hat rectangle, then glue the brim piece onto the edge of the red, then glue the whole thing down onto the head. (Ours goes off the page because my daughter put the big white circle down before I could hang on and help place it, so everything ended up higher than it was intended to be, but I think it looks neat like this.)
- Glue the six small black circles on for eyes and mouth and the orange sliver for the nose on the top snowball.
- Glue on the three buttons/larger black circles on the mid-section snowball.
- Glue one of the red scarf rectangles across the neck area of the snowman, then put a dot of glue on the end of another piece and glue to one side, then put a dot of glue on the end of the last piece and place it over the previous piece, but at a different angle. Then roll the loose ends around your finger a bit so the scarf ends lift off the paper and "blow" in the breeze.
- Draw the arms, or glue on the twigs or paper arms.
- Paint white snow under the base of the snowman, then paint the snowflakes, making them all a little different. You can make large 8-pointed flakes and smaller 6-pointed flakes and really small ones that are just dots.
- You can be done at this point or you can add cotton for snow and snowballs. I found out that my cotton balls were rolled, so I just unrolled one and glued it down for snow on the "ground." Then we tore some pieces off and shaped snowballs and then my daughter decided we needed whole cotton balls too -- so add those too, if you're so inclined!