The first one we did was a name snowman. It really helps to have everything cut out ahead of time, especially if you have little ones who are going to be doing the crafts. If you have older kids who you trust with scissors then you can let them cut out their own shapes. What you need is circles. One for each letter of their name as well as one more for the head of the snowman. Then you will need the basics...eyes, nose, mouth, arms, hat etc... and last a piece of long skinny paper to be used as the back ground.
I put glue on the paper where the pieces were supposed to go and let my boys put the pieces on. They are similar yet have their own angles. Once they get older and understand what they are doing a little better then they can do their own gluing.
Here are our finished snowmen. I think they are adorable and its a great thing to use for letter and name recognition. My 3 year old will say something like "Hey Zekey has my 'E' in his name" which is pretty cute!
The next craft is really easy to do as well. All it takes are a couple of empty jars. We used plastic peanut butter jars...I have boys...these get thrown around A LOT! But they love playing with them. Then you will need a lot of cotton balls and some pieces of snowman body parts cut out (eyes, nose, arms and mouth).
After they are finished stuffing their jars you can give them the body parts. This was hard for my boys to do and I ended up doing most of this part but they still had fun with them. You slid the arms in on the sides between the jar and the cotton balls then you do the rest of the items. We had the jars pretty full so it was hard to get them in there.
but they turned out pretty cute! You can use a bow or an old sock as a hat. We didn't bother with that because I knew it would have just gotten ripped off but my boys still love to play with these jarred snowmen!
