Snow Day Activities: Rainbow Wreath & a Snow Slide

Today was, seemingly, the bazillionth snow day of the school year. Luckily, I saw this one coming. Yesterday I scanned Pinterest for some ideas and made a trip to the dollar store for some more snow day supplies. My 5 year old ALWAYS asks for an "activity" (or 3) to keep her busy on our days stuck at home.

Today we worked on rainbow wreaths.

Isn't that cheerful? I love a rainbow.

I started by cutting up a cardboard box, then V and I picked out two bowls from the kitchen to draw the circles - one big and one little. She did the tracing while I held the bowls.

Next we cut up red tissue paper into small squares - about 2" by 2". We put them all into a bowl and I squeezed glue around the outer edge of the cardboard. We crumpled up the paper and stuck them to the glue.

About 1/3 of the way around, we realized that the glue was starting to dry out already. After that, I put down smaller sections of glue at a time.

My 2 year old glued down a few pieces before she lost interest. She mostly enjoyed dumping the sheets of paper out of the bowl and putting them back in.

Yes, during all of this, the 2 year old was wearing a bathing suit and the 5 year old was in a party dress. I'm usually not too concerned about what they wear around the house, but on snow days I really pick my battles.

When we finished the red circle, we cut up the yellow tissue paper into small squares and glued that down to the cardboard. We saved the extra tissue squares for another project (maybe stained glass rainbows).

After we finished two rows of the wreath everyone, especially me, started getting antsy.  We took a much needed snack break, then suited up and headed outside to play in the snow.



On our last snow day, I noticed that the stairs to our basement door were completely covered in snow. Dragging the kids far enough to get to a safe sledding hill by myself (my husband almost always works on snow days) sounded unpleasant, so I decided that making a snow slide would be the next best thing.

This time around the snow was very airy and there wasn't quite enough to fill the stairs, but I shoveled some from the yard onto the stairs and packed it down a little and we were good to go.

K is still a bit too nervous to go down by herself, so I made a few slides down balancing a girl on each leg. It's a short ride, I think we have 5 or 6 stairs down, but fun.

I expect this will be a regular snow day activity from here on out. Who needs a playground when you can have your own snow slide?

After we came inside the girls took a bath and then we finished up the rainbow wreaths with green, blue, and purple.

I helped V quite a bit and I'm not sure she would have had the stamina to do a whole wreath on her own, but she enjoyed the project and was really proud to show off the results to her Dad. K got a bit frustrated and pulled off a few of the paper pieces at one point, but she really liked dumping out the paper and putting it back into the bowl and crumpling it up.

When we were finished with our projects, we hung one wreath on the front door and one on the door to V's room.

Rainbow wreath supplies: 
cardboard box
tissue paper in several colors
glue
scissors

Snow slide supplies:
snow
stairs