Winter World

What You Need:

• Blue construction paper
• Paper plate
• Cotton swabs, or small point brushes
• Tempera paint
• Scissors
• Medium-sized bowl for tracing

What You Do:

1. Help your child trace a bowl on a sheet of blue paper. This creates a circle she can cut out for the base of her world.
2. Pour out some paint onto a paper plate.
3. Encourage her to dip the end of a cotton swab, or a paintbrush and dot it onto a piece of scrap paper. Ask her to dot it again and again to see if she can create a shape.
4. Have her begin using the white paint to dot snow at the bottom of her blue circle. Once she has the hang of it, encourage her to make a large circle for the base of her snowman, followed by a smaller circle to rest on top of the larger circle.
5. Encourage her to continue working on her snow scene. Ask her what other elements she could add to complete her snowman. We added a hat and a scarf.
6. Ask her what other objects she should include in her world. Is there a log cabin? A pet? Santa?
7. After she completes her landscape and it dries, ask her to create white dots over the entire landscape so it appears as if snow is falling!
8. Display the finished world on the refrigerator, in a window, or punch a hole in it and string a piece of ribbon through to hang it up.

Note: If you plan to hang the winter world up, you might want to encourage your child to make the world double-sided. Once one side of her world has dried, she can portray a different scene on the other side of the paper circle.