Kindergarten Craft: Snow Globes

One of the things I love about the Kindergarten class is that parents can volunteer to read a story and then do a related craft - I do it about every 7-8 weeks, and it is so much fun. This past week, I read Oliver Jeffers' Lost and Found about a boy and a penguin. I love the illustrations, and it's a sweet story.... but the fun part was the penguin snow globes!

I had several plastic jars left over from a craft I did when Ada was in Kindergarten, so I used those. But any jar would do. Baby food jars would be perfect! I found a "Penguin Toob" at the craft store - with 11 penguin figures to place in the jars. Then I had blue sequins, snowflake shaped sequins and some blue and clear rocks from the floral section so the kids could personalize their scenes.

In the tutorials I read online about making snow globes, you could attach the pieces either with aquarium glue or hot glue - or with something called florist clay. Since I didn't want to glue the penguins (I wanted the kids to be able to arrange their scenes and really do it themselves - not have me glue it for them), I searched for the florist clay. I finally found some at the 3rd store, and was so excited - but then I saw on the label a big  warning "Keep out of reach of children". Hmmmm... parents probably would not be too excited about me handing their kids lumps of toxic clay.

I was stumped (but determined). After walking around the craft store for a while, I found some microwavable soy wax in the candle section. Ah ha! A couple of test runs later, I had it down. On the day before the craft,  I piped a wall of hot glue on the inside of each lid in a circle to keep the melted wax from oozing over to the threads of the lid - if that happens, it won't seal! I know this from experience. Also, if you cut away the wax from the threads, it seems to weaken the wax and a couple of shakes later it breaks apart. So, the hot glue to keep the threads clean is important.

The kids assembled their scenes inside the circle of dried hot glue, and then I poured the melted wax in the circle (which was greasy, but not too hot to touch). While we waited for the wax to dry (about 5-10 minutes), we filled the jars with water, white glitter, any sequins or things the kids wanted floating, and a few drops of glycerin to help slow the glitter down when falling. Then we just closed the jars tightly... voila!