Winter Child Care Activities: Painting With Snow

6 January 2017
 Categories: Education & Development, Blog

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If you run a child care center, in the winter it can often get so cold outside that you can't take your students outside. When that happens, bring the snow inside and have some fun with it.

Collect The Snow

Indoor snow painting is a great way to bring the snow inside and do an art, science and sensory activity all at once. For this art project, you are going to need to send someone outside to collect a bunch of snow that your students can work with.

Prepare The Snow

Once you have the snow you need, you'll need to set up the rest of the learning activity. You are going to want to put the snow on top of slotted metal trays, like the ones that you place cookies on to cool off. Then you are going to want to place those slotted trays on top of large cookie sheets that have sides. The cookie sheets are there to catch the snow as it melts.

Make The Paint

Next, you are going to want to mix paint colors with your students. For the paint, just take some water, put it in a container, and use food coloring to make the colors. You can do this activity before you bring in the snow and show the children how to mix the primary colors together to create other colors.

Decorate The Snow

Then it is time for the kids to get to decorate the snow. You can let the kids paint the snow with a variety of different instruments. You can give your students large paint brushes, or you can give them eye drops so that they can drop the colors onto the snow. You can also provide your students with spray bottles as well as squeeze bottles to color and decorate the snow. You don't have to use all of these instruments at once. One day you can do paint brushes and a different day you can do eye drops and spray bottles.

Using different painting instruments and colors is a great way to mix up this activity and make it one that you can repeat a few times this winter.

Take Pictures Of Their Creations

You can take pictures of each child's artwork, print them out and hang them up in the classroom or share the pictures digitally with their parents.

Discuss Their Observations

When the snow starts to melt, have the students empty their trays into the sink. You can then allow each student to start another masterpiece if you have time in your schedule for it.

After you are done, you can talk at circle time about what the kids like about painting in the snow, how the colors looked on the snow, how the snow reacted to the paint and why the snow melted. Learn more about this subject.