Fun Ways to Play in the Snow

Valentine’s Day is either a day of love and romance … or a day you would like to smash things. Or, I suppose perhaps somewhere in between. A few blogging friends and I decided to get together to have some fun with the other side of Valentine’s Day – a little bit of fun with the smashing side.

We have done oodles of posts on cute and love filled Valentine’s day activities for preschoolers – like our celery hear stamping, 5 reasons I love Grandma, and heart name puzzles. We thought it would be fun to do a little bit of heart breaking too.

I am so happy to be a part of the Little Heart Breakers Blog Hop! At the bottom of this post you will find links to other fun-filled ideas for little heart breakers. If you have some time, pop on over to these blogs – they are wonderful! Each one of the writers is a friend of mine. Lovely and creative … and apparently good at breaking hearts.

We have been busy playing in the snow around these parts … lots and lots and lots of snow has settled in. There are a ton of fun ways to play in the snow – and we have a winter wonderland to be sure!

This is our first winter in our country home and we certainly have some adjusting to do. We have already been snowed in a few times, so now have a good stock of coffee (and canned goods) just to be safe.

We have also had lots of time spent at home. And with two very busy little boys this means outdoor time is essential. Even when it is freezing. So the other afternoon when we were about to venture out, I thought we would tie in our other activity for the day and do some heart breaking.

My idea for the Little Heart Breakers Blog Hop was to do some heart shaped snowball mashing … and in true How We Learn form, we added in some playful learning.

My idea was to dye some snow the primary colours with food colouring, shape it into hearts, and use a potato masher to learn all about colour mixing.

That was my idea.

Mother Nature’s idea was to give us -30 degree weather and snow that was so cold and dry it was similar to sand. Not ideal for shaping into snowballs.

Instead, we simple played in the coloured snow, grabbing shovels of different colours and then mashing them together with the potato mashers.

Later, we brought some snow inside to our water table and did the activity as I had originally planned. Of course there are fun ways to play in the snow that work for both indoors and outdoors.

With a little bit of water added (thanks to a suggestion from Laura over at Lalymom) and the warmer temperatures inside, we were able to easily form some hearts for breaking.

It only took a few drops of food colouring to get nice bright colours – which is probably a good thing since we were doing this activity inside. And my boys are busy (have I mentioned that yet?)

We put 3 piles of snow in three areas of our (dry) water table. We coloured each pile with a different colour of food colouring by adding 5 drops or so of food colouring. I also used a water bottle to squirt a little bit of water into the snow.

Anyways, the activity itself was nice and simple. The boys made some heart-ish shaped snowballs of whatever colour they chose, put them beside each other and mashed them with the potato masher.

Sam, who is 4, knows most of his basic colour mixing, so he was having fun with adding other colours as well. Once he mixed blue and red to get purple, he would play with the idea of adding in more red, or a yellow heart.

Ben, who is 2, is just beginning to explore and play with colour mixing. While he played, we talked about the different names for the colours and he had lots of time to simply play and explore however he liked.

That’s it! Nice and easy and great for inside or out! And if you don’t happen to live in a place where you have snow (and if you do please send your address and we will pop on over mid-February) you could do this activity with ice cubes. You could colour some ice and play with colour mixing as they melted.

Now if you are ready to break a few more hearts – pop on over to these blogs!