Salt Dough Snowman Decorations

For our last The Snowman activity for Storybook Advent this year we are using one of our favourite crafting materials Salt Dough and making some Christmas ornaments for the tree.

The snowman salt dough decorations

We love the snowman in our house. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without watching the snowman on TV. I grew up watching it throughout my childhood and now look forward to watching it with my girls each year.

We also have the book which is part of our book advent calendar each year.

My children love crafting so we always do lots of Christmas crafts throughout December. Inspired by the snowman, this year we decided to make salt dough snowmen. Salt dough is fantastic for children. It doesn’t cost a lot to make, it’s simple to make and there are so many creative ways to use it.

We started by making a batch of salt dough following the recipe below. This recipe makes enough to make 12 snowmen using the snowman cookie cutter we have.

My 3 year old loved helping to mix and knead the dough. She also loved rolling out the dough and cutting out the snowmen too. These are all great fine motor skills for children. The hardest part of this activity with young children is waiting for the salt dough snowmen to dry out in the oven. It takes several hours which as any parent of young children will know is a long time.

Once dry there are endless ways your children can decorate these snowmen. I used Sharpies to decorate a couple myself knowing these would be the most likely to look like snowmen. We’ve used them as props whilst reading The Snowman. My daughter loved being able to act out the story with her snowmen. The party scene is her favourite to act out with our salt dough snowmen.

The rest of the snowmen, I gave to my children to paint using poster paints. They had great fun painting them all their favourite colours. If you want to hang the decorations on your tree then make a hole in the dough before you bake them.

Salt Dough Snowman recipe

• 250g plain flour
• 125g salt
• 125ml water

If you want extra white salt dough check out our White Salt Dough recipe.

How to make Snowmen Salt Dough Ornaments

1. Preheat the oven to the lowest setting (ours is 50C).
2. Start by weighing all the ingredients out and mixing them all together in a large bowl. This is a great bit to do with preschoolers. If you use digital scales, it’s perfect for working on number recognition.
3. Mix until it forms a dough. You may need to add a little more water at this point until it all comes together to form a dough.
4. Flour the work surface and transfer the dough to the surface. Knead briefly and then roll out the dough until it is about 1cm thick. 
5. Cut out the snowmen using your cookie cutter and carefully transfer them to a baking tray. Repeat until you have used all your dough up. Then transfer the tray to the oven. Bake until the snowmen are solid. This took between 3-4 hours for ours but it will vary.
6. Once the snowmen are cool, decorate them however you want.

More SNowman Inspired Crafts and Activities for Kids

• Snowman Art Projects for Kids
• Melted Snowman Sensory Bag
• Easy to make 3-ingredient Snowball Cookies