How To Build A Snow Bear and Craft

“How to Build a Snow Bear” by Eric Pinder and Stephanie Graegin

The day after a blizzard hits his town Thomas notices a bunch of new snow sculptures on his street and he cannot wait to go home and build one of his own.  Once home he gets started, however he soon finds that he needs a helping hand to put the head on top.  He knows just who to ask, his little brother!   It takes some coaxing to get his little “bear” brother out of bed and then the two head out to enjoy a moment together completing the snow bear and then some traditional snow fun such as sledding.  This is such a sweet little story about two brothers who know what it means to be family and have an endearing relationship.  The illustrations are adorable companions to the text making it all-in-all a delightful book.

Click here to purchase “How to Build a Snow Bear”  *affiliate link

“How to Build a Snow Bear” inspired Craft of Marshmallow Dough Snow Bear

A perfect and obvious Beyond the Book activity for this book would be to head outside in the snow and make a snow bear!  That would be so fun wouldn’t it?  However, we are still waiting on our first snow and sometimes it is nice to have a warm and cozy activity to do inside when it is cold and blustery outside.  That is why I thought it would be fun to make marshmallow play dough snow bears!  Fun for all ages and so easy to do!

Supplies:

• Marshmallow Dough made from OneLittleProject.com  (I followed her recipe and made four batches for our snow bear.)
• 2 chocolate chip cookies
• 2 toothpicks or tiny twigs
• a bit of ribbon
• 2 raisins (the illustrations shows buttons, but I wanted something edible)
• a slice from the tip of a carrot

Process:

Follow the tutorial and recipe found HERE at One Little Project to make the dough.  I made a quadruple batch for our snow bear.  Then you simply assemble your him.  That easy!  Her dough is edible which makes it “taste test” safe for little artists and has a fun rubbery quality to it.  I thought it was perfect for this activity!  I wanted smaller cookie ears that were more proportionate to our bear so I used a frosting tip with the size of circle I wanted to cut out the center of a Chips Ahoy cookie.  I thought the end result was quite cute and it is definitely an activity that we will be doing again!

If you give this Beyond the Book activity a try I’d love to hear how it goes! Share it on Instagram using hashtag #beyondthebook (I’m on Instagram as @book.nerd.mommy) or even just comment here with your thoughts. It would make my day! Or to simply save for later pin the image below.