Having felt extra sluggish and less motivated than normal over the last couple of weeks, we were overdue for another themed day! This week, I’m feeling more energized and ready to re-conquer our quarantine routine. So for our most recent quarantine theme day, we pretended to have a ….
Snow Day!
With a tropical storm out in the Atlantic Ocean, the forecast for the week is rain, rain and more rain. So with the very slight dip in temperatures and lots of clouds, we did all things related to snow! In a perfect world I probably would have made snowflake shaped pancakes or waffles for breakfast, but since I still had leftover pancakes from the batch I made on Sunday (I always make extra to make for easier weekday mornings) so I just fixed those for the girls when they woke up. I then thought I would make them peanut butter sandwiches for lunch with the snowflake cookie cutter, but they requested hot dog with macaroni and cheese so let me share with you all of our crafts and activities that made for a fun, snow-filled day.
Salt Dough Mittens
Salt dough is quickly becoming one of my favorite activities to do with the girls. The ingredients are few, the process is simple and it makes for the best keepsakes. I foresee some grandparent gifts being made from salt dough in the near future. If you read about our Christmas themed day, you’ll know we made salt dough ornaments with which to decorate our little tree. If not, you can read it here and if you scroll down to the bottom, you will find the salt dough recipe.
This was my first time attempting to make handprint impressions with the salt dough. For Laney (3), I knew this would be easy because she loves to do things with her handprint and knows how to follow directions of how to hold her hand. For Morgan (19 months), not so much. She want to ball up her hand or press her fingertips to hard into the salt dough once she touches it. For this reason, I decided to just do one ‘mitten’ for each of them using opposite hands to create a mismatched pair of mittens. And because of this, I halved the recipe. However, if you want to do both hands for multiple kids, definitely stick with the full recipe.
Once baked and cooled, the girls painted their handprints with the chosen colors. I then simply added a ribbon to connect them and voila!
Snow Stories
While the mittens were baking, the girls and I sat down to read some books I had set aside for our theme.
I bought this one when Laney was a little bit younger and it’s great for counting. It also has some texture to the pages so it’s also a fun sensory touch-and-feel book too. Morgan has recently become partial to Olaf so she loves pointing to him on every page.
I love Jill McDonald’s books. She has one on just about every topic with fun illustrations. This one goes through the four seasons describing what the weather looks like and the pieces of clothing you typically wear at that time of year.
With Laney’s penguin obsession, this was a fun find at the library pre-coronavirus and she loved it so much, we bought it to add to our home library. The lines of the book rhyme (my favorite!) and the illustrations are look-and-find style. The fuzzy penguin is actually fuzzy and is hidden amongst other penguins in each scene, so you have to look and feel around to find her on each page!
This is a book from my toddler years! It is great for teaching shapes and colors.
Insta-Snow
Every month we receive our Craft+Boogie subscription box. And judging by the name, you have probably already figured out that it is full of crafts! When Laney sees the colorful box on our doorstep she gets so excited because she knows it’s for her! In January, our box included an insta-snow mixture. We never had a chance to create the snow diorama that it was initially intended for, so I saved it for another day that we may need a sensory activity. Well the day had come with our Snow Day! I poured the contents of the baggy into a clear container, added the right amount of water as instructed and we watched the snow erupt! It was so cool! We just played with the snow by itself, but you could easily add other things like glitter, small toys or supplies to make a mini snowman.
There are plenty of DIY ideas out there on how to make homemade snow, but seem even
messier than what we did since most recommend using baking soda and shaving cream as well as a lot of trial and error with how much to add with lots of stirring until you get the right consistency. Here I’ve linked a product like we used where you simply scoop a measured amount, add the corresponding amount of water and you have instant snow!
Ice Painting
This activity was SO much fun! However, I made a rookie mom mistake that I’ll get to in a minute. For this activity you’ll need an ice tray, water, food coloring, popsicle sticks and
paper. To prep, fill your ice tray with water and then add your desired colors — using them by themselves and mixing them together to create other colors. This is an easy way to get your kids involved to practice their colors. I went on the heavier side when dropping in the food coloring, 10 or so drops, to have vibrant colors for painting. Remember that mistake I mentioned? This next step is the one I forgot … be sure to add popsicle sticks, even breaking them in half so that they aren’t so long, to each of the ice cubes so that you have a handle while painting. Morgan now has blue hands and Laney looks like she has been caught red handed! Ha! Then place them in the freezer long enough to become solid. I used a silicone mold so that they would be easy to pop out, so if you use something like this too, be sure to put it on a small cookie sheet to keep it level in the freezer.
When you’re ready to paint, simply pop out your colored cubes and go to town on your paper! The end product is stunning and my girls had so much fun doing this! I plan to frame a few that they made and hang them in our playroom!
We, of course, watched both Frozen movies and had a special dessert after dinner … mini
snowballs, aka mini marshmallows. My girls love them and it had been awhile since I had bought them, so it was a special treat! Also, anyone else in love with Bruni after being Frozen II? I recently found this walking Bruni toy and the girls love him!
Until our next themed day!
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