Transferring Snowballs Tray Activity

I saw a similar activity on this post by Tot Play and I wanted to set up a similar activity of my own. I’ve seen similar ideas on other blogs too, but I first saw it on Tot Play so that’s the post I’m referencing.

I decided to set it up as a tray activity. I put the tongs and shovel at the top, the snowman tin on the left and on the right; I arranged the three bowls from largest at the top to smallest on the bottom. I took a course on tray activities once and it said to set up the tray as you would when you are reading. What they mean is have the very first thing the child will pick up at the top and then have the rest of the activity move from left to right as they work their way from top to bottom. They explained it better than I can, but I hope that makes sense. Since this was the largest tray I had and it still wasn’t big enough, I set it up as close as I could to that format. The snowman tin was a little too big for the tray, but I thought it was cute for the theme.

This is a great activity for fine motor skills. I started with the snowman tin closed.



Next the tin was opened and there were the assortment of snowballs. I used cotton balls, pompoms, marshmallows, beads and paper balls. The three bowls were supposed to correspond to the size of the snowball. The cotton and paper balls were for the large bowl, the marshmallows and medium sized pompoms were for the medium bowl and the beads and tiny pompoms were for the small measuring cup. The kids might decide though that some of the pompoms would work better in the larger bowl and that’s okay. They might also decide to sort them in a different way and do what makes sense to them. I included the tongs and shovel in case one or the other would be too challenging for some reason or just so they can have a choice of which object to use.





Finally, some extensions of this activity would be to make patterns with the snowballs. How many different patterns can you make? They can be sorted in a line from largest to smallest or smallest to largest. Each type of snowball can be counted and sorted. How many beads, cotton balls etc? For children who are a little bit older, you can use the snowballs to work on simple addition or subtraction problems. They can also transfer the snowballs back and forth between the bowls or pour a full bowl of snowballs into an empty bowl. How many snowballs does it take to fill up the large bowl? How many snowballs does it take to fill up the small measuring cup? How many more snowballs do you have to use to fill up the bowl if they are smaller? What other objects around the house can we use for snowballs? If you have snow outside, you can spend some time outside making different sized snowballs and doing some sorting, patterning and counting and making different sized snowmen or snow structures. Either way, playing with snow and snowballs is always fun!