Cotton Ball Snowman

This craft is about at the level of my little toddler - at 20 months old, he wants to do things, but doesn't have the fine motor skills yet for cutting and precision (or anything remotely resembling precision) - I had to help him with the eyes, the nose, the mouth, and the buttons - but he sure loved touching and playing with the cotton balls before building his snowman! 

To make things easy for him, and to help him understand what exactly it was that we were building, I googled 'snowman template' and found this delightfully simple shape, which I printed out on regular paper.  (Thank you, Bianca, at A Little Delightful!)

I cut the snowman shape out and glued it on some blue paper.  I then spread out some white glue all over the snowman shape with a popcicle stick, handed the bowl of cotton balls to H, and he went to town building his 'nowman. 

 I wasn't precise at all with the other shapes - just roughly cut out some shapes about the same size, dabbed a bit of glue on the back, and stuck them to the snowman.  I took one of the wooden coffee swizzle sticks from the package I had picked up on impulse at the dollar store (I was mainly thinking of snow flakes for those - a craft yet to come!), cut it in half, put a dab of glue on the cut end of each, and voila! - our 'nowman had arms! 

It took a few hours for all of the glue to dry, but H is very happy with the result.  It sits in the window in the kitchen now, and he shows all of our guests the snowman!  ("Two!  Two!  Two 'nowman!" - go and check out our post on how to transform your fridge into a snowman, too!)

For this project, I picked up a bag of cotton balls and a package of coffee swizzle sticks at the dollar store.  I already had in the house white glue, scraps of construction paper/scrapbooking paper, scissors, and ribbon. Looking forward to making more winter crafts with these, too!