I just made these really cute snowmen with my daughter (thanks, pinterest) and think that I have a few kiddos that are closer to three I may try this with. It was beyond simple- small powdered doughnuts, leftover candy corn and a little black decorative icing. Clean up was really easy, too! The original recipe called for mini chocolate chips for the eyes and mouths but I had a tube of black decorative icing in my pantry we used instead.
Another favorite winter project for me is cotton ball snowmen. I've been making these with my therapy kiddos for years. I typically use just have the kids make circles with the glue and squeeze lots of glue in the middle to fill the circles in, stick on the cotton balls, add a little pipe cleaner nose and draw the arms. I've also had the kids draw circles to form a snowman on contact paper, cut the circles out and then stuck the cotton balls onto the sticky side of the contact paper. It's less messy than glue and you don't have to wait for it to dry to hang it up. The contact paper method usually requires more hand over hand assistance (for the cutting, mostly) and can take a little longer. This activity is excellent for fine motor practice, of course, by I also love it for sensory play, color identification and even building frustration tolerance (hey, cutting is hard work for most of my early intervention friends).
One of my favorite winter books to use in therapy sessions is Karen Katz's Toes, Ears & Nose. It has children that are dressed for the cold weather. Each cold weather article of clothing is a flap that lifts up to show the body part the clothing protects. The text will say "Inside my mittens, I've got..." and then you lift the mitten flap to expose the fingers and it finishes the sentence with "fingers." I love that it does this because it allows for what my friend and colleague Claire calls the "hesitate and hold," which is is verbally setting the child up to answer a familiar question. It encourages expressive language that is built into a familiar routine. * I also love that this book teaches the functions of clothing like mittens, hats, coats. Object function/associative skills can be a difficult to master and I like to reinforce them any way I can. In a child who isn't ready for these kinds of skills, you can target vocabulary building. In my neck of the woods, winter clothing is very functional vocabulary!
*Hesitate and Hold is a great trick that you can use in seemingly limitless ways. I also like to use it while knocking down towers, too. You say "KA-BOOM" and knock over a tower a few times. Then you knock over the tower, say "KA!" and freeze, allowing the child to say "BOOM!"
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