It’s winter, my children really want snow, but sadly, all we get at them moment is rain, rain and more rain, so last week we made our own snow!! It was fantastic messy fun!
It’s so simple to make, just mix cornflour and shaving foam. You do need quite a lot of both. I used a whole can of ‘value’ shaving foam and a whole box of cornflour.
We had fun mixing the ingredients up with our hands, exploring the texture, the stickiness, how it forms together. 
Next, we spent time simply playing with the ‘snow’. We made snowballs, a snowman and stuck raisins and a bit of dried apricot on it for the face. It looked quite authentic. We talked about how it felt and what we could do with it. My girls really enjoyed this and throughout the the messy play, Boo kept telling me “this is the best play ever!!” Well, it’s got to be a winner then hasn’t it?
After we had finished exploring the snow we made, we threw it away and used the rest of the shaving foam for some messy play. I added a little food colouring for them to mix in, to add even more interest. Again, this was amazing fun, swirling the pretty colours round before it turned pink, then simply playing with the texture. We also wrote letters in it and drew shapes.
My girls had so much fun making snowmen and experimenting with messy play, we thought we’d have another go as a whole family at the weekend, so BB didn’t miss out. We did the same as before, except we made one of the snowmen out of bicarbonate of soda instead of cornflour. It did have a slightly different texture to the cornflour which was very interesting, it was much finer.
Everyone had a fantastic time, BB made snowballs, a snowman (which he was very proud of) and then we got out the cutters and made shapes. It was interesting watching what the children came up with.
Next, they all decided they wanted to take this messy play a little further, so got in with it! They buried their feet, they talked about the textures and how their feet felt, they laughed and giggled before finally admitting they’d had enough and got out.
Before throwing the snow away, because we used bicarbonate of soda, we decided to pour some vinegar on it to see what happened……it made loads of bubbles! This was fantastic for the children to watch….a chemical reaction. They got very excited!
Lastly, we got the shaving foam out again on its own. BB loved this and got completely covered in foam, even in his hair and face, knees and feet! It was incredibly messy, but good clean mess, that was sorted very quickly and easily
I would seriously recommend giving this a go, we all had so many giggles and it was lovely to spend time talking and watching the children’s imagination develop. They learnt a lot about texture, language, colour mixing, modelling, letters and basic fun! I can’t believe we made an indoor snowman without real snow! We LOVED it!
