Toddler-Friendly Winter Craft: Painting Snowflakes with Cotton Swabs
Are you ready for a fun, engaging activity that will take you moments to prep and keep your littles busy for more than 5 minutes? Painting snowflakes with cotton swabs is going to be that project!!
You don’t need to spend all evening on prepping a project for it to be exciting for your littles.
True two thumbs up moment for this craft, we were able to craft with our multi age group of 1-year-olds to 5-year-olds and everyone stayed engaged for our art time!
Prepping Your Space
Like all our projects with paint, we are first going to want to cover our workspace. I like placing a plastic tablecloth down first covered by large sheets of paper or flattened cardboard boxes.
I love having the ability to reuse all of these items, but I also enjoy knowing that it’s not a big deal if we need to throw it out in the end.
- Cover your space. I recommend large pieces of flattened cardboard or kraft paper. Dollar store tablecloths are great too, they wipe up easy or if the mess is a little extra, fold it up and throw it out.
- Cover your child. I love using an old t shirt cut up the sides for easy on and off over their heads, but whatever you have, smocks, bibs, aprons. Use it!!
- Get your clean up kit ready. I would have a washcloth ready for each child as well as some wet wipes for little spills and clean up during the project.
- You know your kids best, while my group of preschoolers probably wouldn’t start painting their toes like my toddlers sometimes do…yours may. Have the proper clean up items ready!
- This particular project we got away with just using some wet wipes, that’s not to say one of my littles didn’t go astray and do a little painting on his hands.
- Completely set up the project. One area I have found to have success with messy art and groups of toddlers and preschoolers (infants too if they’re participating) is to have everything set up before I call them to the table.
- Preschoolers tend to be ready for the next step before you can blink so having everything available to them allows all children to go at the pace they want without your head spinning trying to run around getting the next thing ready.
What You Need
Materials:
- Construction Paper -we used black (then blue for our bonus project)
- White colored pencil or crayon
- cotton swabs for your ‘paint brush’
- Paint -I offered white and light blue
- (optional) straight edge
What We Did
Since I was working with two-year-olds for this particular craft, I did all the prep work drawing snowflakes onto the paper with the white colored pencil.
If you work with older children, have them draw their own snowflakes to expand this project!
TIP: Can’t find a ruler? I used the edge of a muffin box as my straight edge, so don’t go searching, anything with a hard straight edge works great!
Related Article: Rainbow Cotton Swab Painting
Incorporating Infants and 1-Year-Olds
Tape a sheet of construction paper to the top of your highchair tray and hand your little a paint brush you dipped in paint.
…Say what now??
I get it!!
This can seem almost terrifying if you don’t generally bring your littlest of learners on the painting adventure.
I encourage you to give it a try.
- Tape a sheet of paper to the highchair tray
- Dip the tip of the brush into some paint and hand it over
- Stay close and be prepared for
- taste testing
- dropping the brush to the floor
- sitting and staring at the project
- grabbing the wrong end of the brush
- a super happy and excited one year old joyfully painting
Each time you let them participate will get a little easier, or at least you will gain a little more comfort.
Ways To Learn
- Read books about snowflakes before, during or after this craft
- Talk about the colors used
- What color is your paper?
- What color paint are you using?
- How many snowflakes are on your paper?
- Give simple directions then let them at it!
- We talked about how you can trace the lines
- we also talked about how you can dot dot dot the lines
The End Results
When we began this project I wasn’t quite sure how they would choose to create their snowflakes.
Would they dot dot dot or trace the lines like I had demonstrated in the beggining?
Would they color the whole paper in whatever pattern they chose?
Perhaps they would color over the snowflakes but not on the lines.
Maybe they’d even look at the project and tell me no, they weren’t painting today. (kidding, these kids would paint all day if we could)
When you’re done painting snowflakes with cotton swabs, swap out their paper for another sheet of construction paper and let the painting fun continue!!
Takeaway Tips
- Try out new painting materials!! Kids love to paint with paintbrushes…and cotton swabs…and pompoms…and forks.
- Try this out with fingertips!!
- Not all projects have to take a ton of materials and prep time.
- Sometimes it’s okay to just enjoy the process and not worry about having a masterpiece to send home. The thing is, to these kids, these are masterpieces and they get so excited showing moms and dads what they made!
You have everything you need in your home to create fun engaging projects!!
Sometimes you need a quick project on the fly and this one fills that category.
Happy Crafting!!