Merry Christmas! This is my daughter’s second time seeing snow and from the last activity I figured she hasn’t seen much snow or snowman. She was calling the snowman an owl. So I was trying to figure out another indoor activity to teach her about Christmas and snowmen. We doing activities indoor because of the covid pandemic and also we haven’t had much snow here. My daughter is 16 months old now and I’ve been talking to her in Chinese since she was born. At least I’ve been trying to since I’m a CBC and my Chinese is not the best. I’m not literate or fluent in the language so my parents are really helping me translate and explain baby nursery rhyme lyrics and helping with Chinese words too. Initially I wanted to be at my parents place so she can be immersed in the Chinese language all the time but since the pandemic hit, I’m not over there as much as I want to. So it’s just me and the occasional video chats. So back to the activity, this activity is building a snowman with cottonballs. She can identify stars now so I used this opportunity to combine an activity with stars.
Building a Snowman with Cottonballs
Chinese Vocabulary
- snowman (雪人, shuet yun)
- star (星, xing)
a) Building a Snowman with Cottonballs
I know I didn’t have to use so much construction paper, but I made 3 different snowman that included 3 circles and a rectangle square hat. Since my daughter is only 16 months old, I cut out all the shapes and glued them onto a construction paper first before she glues on the cottonballs. When my daughter gets older I will let her do that herself. The snowman shapes are on the construction paper. I want her to get all dirty because that’s what toddlers like to do. After creating the snowman construction paper, I wrote snowman on it.
What you need:
Result:
She had fun with her snowman. I would place glue on the construction paper for her to put the cottonballs, but she really wanted to put the glue on herself. So the next activity, I will try to put the glue in a container where she can place the glue on herself. She also loved throwing the cottonballs herself on the snowman and kept on saying it was an owl. I did repeat many times that it’s snowman but she really insisted that it was an owl. Guess it will take more time for her to learn it’s a snowman. At least we had some fun
b) Building a Snowman with Cottonballs – Stars
The Christmas Tree puzzle I created for her taught her star. Whenever she sees a star, she will say star (in Chinese). So I wanted to add that to this activity too so I bought a star stamp for her to play with. I used yellow construction paper and stamped a couple stars which produced smaller stars. I glued the black construction paper and sprinkled the smaller stars on it creating a starry night as the background for the snowman. More opportunity for me to say snowman to her.
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Result:
She saw me star punching and saw the little stars she was intrigued. The star punch was small but she grabbed it and started punching away on the yellow construction paper. She practiced her fine motor skills trying to pick up the stars and gathered them up and threw them onto the black construction paper. It created a great picture of a snowman in a starry night. We had fun star punching away and still find little stars everywhere. So she will randomly say STAR when we don’t expect it and we look around and there’s a little star on the ground. It brings lots of laughs and I guess reinforces the shape and Chinese vocab.
Have fun!
Mommy Dragon
