By Dyan Robson, And Next Comes L

My kids really enjoy building snowmen, but sometimes the Saskatchewan winters hit hard with chilly temperatures—leaving us to do fewer outdoor activities and more indoor ones.

Instead, we build snowmen indoors with fun, simple activities like this build-a-snowman math game.

It's a great way to work on counting, addition, one-to-one correspondence and even sneak in some fine motor skills practice!

You Will Need:

white cardstock and large circle paper punch (you could use cotton balls or cotton pads instead of cardstock)

markers

dice

My son loves to use paper punches and they are a great way to work on fine motor skills, so my four-year-old used the circle paper punch to make the snowballs out of cardstock.

I drew a snowman face on two of the circles. You can draw more faces if more people will be playing the game.

How To Play:

Each player gets a snowman face to start with.

Then, each player takes turns rolling a die and adding snowballs to the snowman's body. The number you roll on the die is the number of snowballs you add to your snowman.

There are a few ways to play this game. For instance, you could race to 10 or 20 and see who can build their snowman first.

Another way to play is to see how tall you can build your snowman before you run out of snowballs.

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You could also do a subtraction version (melt your snowman, perhaps?) by starting with a set number of snowballs. Remove the number of snowballs from your snowman's body equivalent to the number you roll on the die.

You can also take this game on the go by adding the materials to a small zipper seal bag to turn it into a busy bag.