Thumbprint Snowmen

Today we tried our hands, or fingers I guess, at making some thumbprint snowmen. First I cut out some blue foam into circles and also got out a few sheets of blue construction paper. Then we got to work with white and black finger paint. The boys were very careful to dip just their thumb and only make 2 or 3 prints in a row on their papers. I let them go to town on the construction paper making as many snowmen as they liked but we were careful when doing the foam circles to only have 1 or 2 snowmen per circle. After we were done with the white I washed their hands and got out the black finger paint to add the print for the snowmen's hats. (I have made the mistake in the past to just give them all of the finger paints at once and the paints end up getting all mixed so this time we only had one color at a time and washed hands in between.) We then let our work dry for a few hours while we had dinner and took a bath. (Hint: I do activities like finger painting on days when we are having baths and make sure the boys take off any special clothes they may be wearing.) After their paint dried I gave them each a thin tipped black marker to draw eyes, arms, and buttons on their snowmen. You could even get out an orange marker or paint to make a "carrot" nose but we chose just to keep to the black and white on blue background.