Rainy Day Projects

Snow Day Arts & Crafts for kids

Paper, glue, paint, and recycled-material projects with a finished thing to keep.

Part of Snow Day activities and all arts & crafts.

No-prep ideas for this

Something to say right now while you get the snow day set out — or instead of it. All the quick ideas.

  • Design the inside of a spaceship — every room — and label what each one does.

    Design a spaceship on paper — draw every room inside it and label what each room is for. Include at least one room the adult would not expect.

    15 minutes · Ages 8–10 · Kids can run it · Low mess · Needs: paper, pencil

    Make more of it: Tabletop Solar System Orrery →

  • Trace your hand on paper and then turn it into some kind of creature.

    Trace one of your hands on paper. Then turn the outline into an animal, a monster, or anything else you can imagine.

    5 minutes · Ages 3–8 · Light adult help · Low mess · Needs: paper, crayons

    Make more of it: Torn-Paper Feathered Bird Collage →

  • Grab a pencil and draw a face without ever lifting it off the paper.

    Draw a face on your paper without lifting your pencil once. Every line must connect to the last one. See what you end up with.

    5 minutes · Ages 5–10 · Kids can run it · Low mess · Needs: pencil

Snow Day Arts & Crafts at home

A snow day does not arrive with a plan attached. School is cancelled, the house fills up fast, and by mid-morning the energy needs somewhere to go. Arts and crafts work especially well here because they are long enough to actually fill time — not fifteen minutes and done — and they produce something real at the end, which gives the day a shape and a feeling of accomplishment that screen time does not. These three projects were chosen specifically because they each run at least 45 minutes, accommodate the higher energy of a full unexpected day home, and can tolerate a little noise and movement around them while a child stays focused on the work.

What is in this set

The three snow Day Arts & Crafts activities here run from 45 to 90 minutes — Torn-Paper Collage Animal Portraits is the quickest, Woven Paper Wall Hanging the longest. Between them they cover ages 3–5, ages 5–8 and ages 8–10, and each card below says which. Each one wants an adult at least nearby.

Choosing one

For a three-to-five-year-old who needs you close, start with Torn-Paper Collage Animal Portraits — it is the most contained and the easiest to adapt if attention dips. Cardboard Tube Marble Run suits five-to-eight-year-olds who have energy to burn and want a project with a payoff they can actually play with afterward; it is also the messiest of the three, so lay down newspaper first. Woven Paper Wall Hanging is the right call for an eight-to-ten-year-old who can sustain focus independently for an hour or more and wants a finished piece worth keeping.

Before you start

Across all three projects, the single step most worth doing before you call any child over is the cutting: pre-tear a starter pile of paper for the collage, pre-cut the tube slits for the marble run, and pre-cut the loom slits for the weaving. In every case, that initial preparation is the part most likely to frustrate a child and drain the adult's energy early. Lay down a trash bag or newspaper for the marble run's painting step. The thing that tends to go wrong across all three is running out of material mid-project — collect more tubes, paper, and scraps than you think you need before anyone sits down.

More snow day activities

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