Indoor Snowball Throwing : Great for Parties or Learning!

I have many fond memories of playing in the snow back in Canada.  We rarely get snow here, so my children don’t have a lot of experience with it.  When Tristan was only about 3 I recreated this indoor snowman toss that a friend of mine used when we were teaching together in Japan.  It was so much fun!  I know she didn’t mind me using her idea with other schools there, and I’m sure she won’t mind me sharing it with you today.

This game is super-easy to construct, and can be adapted in so many ways – please feel free to add your own ideas into the comments.

How to make the Snowman

I cut out 3 circles from some white printer paper using plates as templates.  The bottom circle is made from two pieces of paper taped together in order to make it a larger size.   I also cut out a circular hole in the biggest circle.

Next I glued the circles together to form the snowman shape.  And I always did so often when the kids where younger, I covered it with sticky-backed plastic (affiliate link) but you could laminate it if you have the means.

I punched a hole in the top and used some string to hold it up.  Originally, I also had a colourful hat for it that we stuck on with fun tak, but it’s been misplaced while the snowman was in summer storage.

Currently we very carefully hang our snowman from a light fixture, although I wouldn’t recommend that to anyone.  Sticking it up in a door frame would be a much better idea!  Yes, we’ll do that tomorrow.

How to Play

The easy and fun way to play is just to practice hand-eye coordination by throwing paper ‘snow’balls through the hole.  To increase the fun, if someone gets their ball through the hole, then they can use a dry-erase marker (affiliate link) to draw a feature on the snowman’s face.

To bring a little learning into play, we give the snowballs a purpose.  When the kids were young, I used coloured paper to help them learn colours.  I asked them to choose the ‘blue’ ball and they’d choose that one to throw.  It really worked very well!

Now that the children are a little older, we can increase the difficulty of the game to match what they are learning.  As you see, we’ve had this same snowball throwing game around for a few years…you can see the children growing up!

For today’s game, I wrote down random questions for Kallista to answer, which she pulled out of a gift bag.

Some days I write math questions, some days geography, or sight words.  Tristan still loves this game, and we can use questions about grammar, spelling, science or just about any topic you could think of!

How fun would this game be for kids’ parties?!  To make it more challenging, make two and have students/teams compete against each other to complete the face on their snowman.