Fake Snow Painting

Winter doesn’t have to be being cooped up in the house. Engage the children in all kinds of fun winter activities starting with this easy to put together snow activity where they will have a grand time doing snow painting. Thus begins another new season which we will never know even existed. Snow season. Living in the ‘burbs of Southern California, we are severely seasonally-challenged. We don’t see the glorious color changes during fall and snow is a foreign concept. Then, I was reminded of the way we brought in fall into our home- painting our leaves and making a fall tree. For the upcoming snow season, we bring in fake snow. With fake snow we begin a series of winter activities for the kids. You can read more about the material we use here on Steve Spangler Science and on their own website.. It is called “ Insta snow”. It is non-toxic but is still a good idea to supervise small children and wash their hands after play time. We have used this product for two more activities. Our winter sensory bin and our dinosaur goo world.

• Insta Snow
• Colored water
• Spray bottles, squeeze bottles

This snow activity is so easy to put together.We added the fake snow in a tin foil baking pan and added water according to the directions. The transformation is a sight to behold for our little people. The polymer apparently expands 100 times its granular size and watching the expansion and the transformation get the kids really excited. Be prepared for numerous questions after that and resist the temptation to draw an analogy between “ subject matter is beyond the scope of this text book” and the current age of your child.

The kid started off feeling the fake snow for a long time since this is their first time exploring a new play material. Big A was full of questions to which there was only simple answer. Why do we have to add water to make snow? Why can’t I make snow balls” It is too soft. Is real snow too soft? Why is not cold at all? Can I eat it? I was worried about the last one.

Just placing a new material to explore really encouraged her to start thinking about the material and come up with questions.

Once the newness wore off and the fact that it can’t be easily made into ball ( unless you add more water and make it a bit soggy)we moved on to making it colorful.I quickly made colored water (water+food color) and poured them into 4 squeeze bottles. It is better to use an eye dropper or a spoon even. Since we included a toddler in this activity, the concept of gentle squeezing or squeezing in moderation became irrelevant. Having said that, my toddler had excessive amount of fun with colored water spraying. Armed with colored water, it was all about color mixing and requesting more colors.

Ideally for this kind of project you would want to use something that dispenses colored water in controlled quantity.

Spray bottles seem to work the best in terms of controlled dispensing. But for a kid the instant gratification of watching changing colors is quite absent because it does take a few sprays to see colored snow.

The pretty colors did not blend and turn into that infamous muddy brown because we used only limited number of primary colors. But the colors were beginning to lean towards our most used color combination blue and yellow

Finally we were left with a greenish fake snow with which we did another entirely different activity which will be posted shortly. Click here to see our green goo small world.

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