Snow cloud dough and snowman-building

I mentioned in my last blog post that we are still waiting for our first snowfall this winter. I'm sure we'll get it at some point, and hopefully soon. One of my favourite snowy day activities, (and I'm sure it's a favourite of most) is snowman building. Living in the more hilly part of Lincolnshire, we do get our fair share of snow each winter, but it's not always the kind of snow that settles or the amount or consistency of snow needed to make a snowman. We've been doing a fair few wintery craft activities at home over the last few weeks and I wanted to do something that would continue with the winter theme and involve messy play. Making our own snow and building snowmen with it seemed like the perfect choice.

To make the snow itself you need two inexpensive ingredients: cornflour and shaving foam. Yes, really, that's it! I used two boxes of cornflour to one can of shaving foam. As Tommy was going to be exploring and mixing the ingredients with his hands, I used a sensitive brand of shaving foam just to be on the safe side. 

Start by tipping the boxes of cornflour into a shallow box or container. I used a tuff tray, as it gave Tommy lots of space in which to make a mess and working in the middle of it meant there'd hopefully be less to clean up afterwards! Spread the cornflour out a little and spray a little shaving  foam over the surface. Mix the two ingredients together and keep adding shaving foam until the material can be pressed into a ball. You will find the cloud dough very powdery in texture. It can be moulded into shape very easily but also breaks up easily too. If you decide to do this activity with very young children, you might wish to use snow playdough instead, which will hold its shape better and potentially be less frustrating. Glitter and sequins could be added at this stage to make the snow even more sparkly and magical.

 

Tommy spent a LOT of time feeling and playing with the 'snow' before building anything. It felt really soft, silky and cool (similar to the real stuff!). To make it more like the real thing, you could place the snow dough in a plastic bag and put it in the freezer for 10 minutes. We did this the second time we did the activity and it really made a difference! 

After playing with the snow for a while, we decided to begin building some snowman. To decorate them, we used paper cups as hats, ribbon and pipe cleaners as scarves and an assortment of buttons and googly eyes. 

Here are some of our creations! We even made an igloo, which we unfortunately forgot to take a picture of! Boo! 

 

 

This snow dough keeps indefinitely, so it can be used time and time again. We keep ours in a zip loc bag. The possibilities of play with this material are endless - it can be used for lots of small world play.