making a snow globe with a toddler
The little miss has been fascinated with snow globes this holiday season. I thought it would be a great thing to make at the craft party. (Yes, it was just the two girls, but I still like to refer to it as a party.) There are many how-to's out there and they all seemed to vary from using aquarium glue to screw on the lid and go. As much as I love the sparkling falling snow floating slowly upon the trees there was one thing that was holding me back: water! These are two year olds, any element that could lead to disaster that I can omit, well, I'm all for it. That's why I was delighted to come across tidy mom blog and her instruction on waterLESS snow globes. How perfect! Here's what we did:
We started with a large baby food jar. Cut out a circle of felt and hot glued it to the lid.
Next, we had the girls choose a character from the selection of little christmas ornaments I found at Michael's. Clementine chose the snowman named Frosty, to her EVERY snowman is Frosty, and Addie chose Santa. Each picked out a tree that I found already sparkly and decorated with beads. While they played with the extra ornaments, making them dance and "ice skate" on the table, I attended to the hot glue gun.
First the tree was glued down. I took a sparkly pipe cleaner and rolled it into a little ball and glued it to the lid next to the tree. This would help to prop up the characters so they didn't sit so low, I glued the snowman right to the pipe cleaner and a little glue on its back to hold it to the tree.
We had the girls pick out some other things to include in their snowglobe like a pom pom for a big snowball and a sparkly snowflake. These were both glued in place. Now the fun part:
I really did let two two year olds pick up a hand full of fake snow and then shake their own glitter into the jar. I was nervous, I can't lie. At one point the lid on the glitter opened more than I wanted it to and glitter went EVERYWHERE! Thank goodness I covered our work space with paper to help with the clean up. I'm sure our house will be sparkling in places well into summertime. It was worth it!
We put our lid on and turned the jars over. Almost done!
I glued a soft sparkly trim to cover the lid and deter tiny hands from unscrewing. Shake it up and watch it snow!
Clementine has showed everyone who's come over to visit. The perfect snow globe for toddlers!
