Make A Playdough Snowman: Winter Fine Motor Activity For Kids

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Making a playdough snowman is a great winter fine motor and sensory activity for your kids. Use these ideas to make snowman accessories (eyes, carrot noses, scarves, and arms) to add to your winter creation.

Winter isn’t the same everywhere. Even if you and your kids are in a warm climate, they can still make snowmen. They can make a playdough snowman! Here are a few ideas for adding some snowman parts to your little “frozen” creations.

Make Snowman Eyes

First, I’m going to show you a great hack for making snowman eyes. Of course, you can use plain old buttons. I find, however, that plain old buttons just fall out of play dough. This is how you solve that problem. Get yourself some brads and hot glue them to the back of the buttons. Tada! Now, kids can stick the buttons into playdough and they will stick. Note: I found that coloring the head of the brad with a black sharpie before gluing the buttons made the finished product look a little better. As you look through my pictures here, you might be able to spot the non-sharpified eyes.

Use glue to attach brads to your buttons for your snowman eyes.

Make Snowman Noses

The next snowman parts that you can make are carrot noses. To make mine, I sharpened the end of a dowel with a pencil sharpener. Using a handsaw I cut the dowel so that the nose would be about 1.5 inches or so long. I sanded down the point so that it wouldn’t be sharp and sanded down the evidence of my poor sawing technique. After preparing several noses, I painted them with orange acrylic craft paint.

You can use dowels and orange paint to make your snowman's nose.

To make the task of painting a bit easier and neater, I stuck a pushpin into the bottom of each nose. The pushpin made a great little paint-free handle to use as I painted. I held the carrots upright in a blob of play dough as they dried.

Cute, little snowman noses for your playdough snowman activity.

Make Snowman Scarves and Arms

Next, I added some scarves made from strips of colorful felt, I pruned some small branches from the crepe myrtle tree in front of my house so that the snowmen could have arms.

Use pieces of colorful felt for your snowman's scarves.

Add Snowman Hats

I dug out some black felt hats that I picked up at an after-Christmas clearance sale at a craft store a few years ago. Want a different hat for your snowmen? You can make a cute hat from a kid’s sock.

Add a cute snowman hat to your playdough snowman activity.

Putting it All Together

Add your snowman playdough accessories to white play dough…..and tada…a snowman. It’s also a super winter fine motor activity.

I had some white brand-name playdough on hand, but you can make white playdough too. Place the accessories, and a ball of playdough in a tray and you have a great invitation to play for your kids. You can also put together a little snowman-making kit to give as a gift. Just package a few accessories, along with a container of playdough, and place it in a nice plastic container or cello bag.

Ta Da, an adorable playdough snowman activity for a winters day.

Additional Ideas

Use Snowman Sequencing Cards along with the playdough and accessories.

For a different sensory experience, you and your kids can also add snowman parts to floam. When I was in the classroom we used floam with snowman parts, but the preschool never seemed to have enough white floam. Colored floam worked, but the snowmen always looked a little bit comical. My kiddo and I made the white floam pictured here using the same recipe that I used for my Halloween witches. I just didn’t add any food coloring to the mixture so that the finished product was a bright white. The homemade floam feels a bit more wet than the variety that you can buy, but it provides a nice sensory experience.