Kids Activities: Winter Art Project for Toddlers

Have you got snow where you live? This week, my two-year-old son and I are celebrating the return of whiteness in our yard by building snow forts, admiring icicles and making simple winter-themed art, toddler-style. You can join us later even if you aren't snowed in!

-      snowflake stickers

-      blue, violet and white tempera paint

-      roller and brushes

-      big sheet of paper or canvas

First, I asked my son to stick snowflakes to a sheet. He likes using stickers and it is always good fine motor practice for little fingers! We used a set of paper snowflakes and a set of silicone ones. The silicone ones did not hold up to his expressive brush work later, so I recommend getting paper or foam-rubber stickers to block out the parts of paper that are not to be painted.

We had paint, brushes and rollers ready to use. My son has grown fond of rollers, having seen me paint furniture around the house, so I have been including them in his artistic experiments. The results have been interesting, too – evenly textured surfaces and fully covered sheets of paper. He started working on this project with a brush, but then switched to a roller, then went back in to add more texture with a brush. It is especially noticeable on the finished piece: the swirls in the middle were painted with the brush and the corners were flattened with the roller.

After my son covered the sheet with a couple of layers of paint and had his hands satisfactorily coated as well, we cleaned up and left the paint to dry. After a couple of hours, the paint was dry enough that we could peel the stickers off. The snowflakes preserved the white underneath!

While toddlers soon learn to paint representative objects, creating abstract art is still an important and fun exercise for young artists. The finished art works make fun gifts for loving relatives, or to inspire pride in your toddler when displayed on the walls.

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