My first Busy Bag creation was the Build-A-Snowflake activity, which I discovered in Money Saving Mom’s blog post Busy Bag Idea: Felt Snowflakes. Your child chooses a card showing a picture of a snowflake and builds the snowflake with felt pieces. If they choose a question mark card, they can create a snowflake of their own. This simple activity promotes shape and pattern recognition and also encourages creativity.
Items Needed:
White felt
Dark Blue or Other Dark Color Felt
Cardboard
FREE Printable Patterns
Scissors
Glue
Laminating Materials (optional)
How To:
Print out the FREE patterns at Making Learning Fun. Cut out the snowflake cards and snowflake pattern pieces. Trace the snowflake pattern pieces onto the white felt, then cut out. There is only one of each snowflake piece pattern (i.e. square, circle, etc.), but you will need to cut multiple shapes of each type as shown in the picture below:
To make the snowflake cards more durable, I opted to laminate them. I use a small personal laminating machine, the Scotch™ Thermal Laminator TL-901, which I picked up at Target for about $25. Click here for more on laminating options, tips and photos. (POST LINK)
For the playing board, I cut an 8” square from cardboard and covered it with dark blue felt using hot glue. I only glued on the back side of the board so that there wouldn’t be any bumpy areas on the front. I pulled the felt tight and glued the edge to the back side of the cardboard square. For the corners, I cut the felt at an angle so that there was only one layer of felt on the corners.
A quart-size Zip-Lock bag works great for storing all the parts and has a handy spot for labeling.
Resources:
Money Saving Mom – Busy Bag Idea: Felt Snowflakes
My Little Alberta Family – Snowflake Activity – Detailed instructions with pictures
Making Learning Fun – Visual Discrimination Snowflake Activity – FREE Printable Pattern
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