What You Actually Need to Know About Working With The Snowman By Raymond Briggs Activities
The Snowman is Raymond Briggs' wordless picture book from 1978, later adapted into a twenty-five-minute animated short with no dialogue. The activities you'll find online are built around the book and animation. Most of them fall into a few clear buckets: art and craft, writing prompts, music recognition, and science learning about snow and winter. They are not especially complicated. They are also not all worth your time. I went through the standard activity packets you get from teaching resource sites a few years ago when I was helping a community library set up a winter story hour. The problem was immediate. A lot of the materials were written for children who had never seen the book or the animation. They assume prior knowledge. If a child hasn't experienced the story first, the worksheets become empty puzzles. The snowman disappears into a blank page before it even starts. The fix is straightforward but easy to skip. Play the animated film first or read the book aloud slowly. Let the participants see the sequence before you hand them anything to fill in. Once they have the narrative in their head, the activities actually connect. Without that, you're just asking kids to color a shape and pretending it means something.
Common Activity Types and How They Work in Practice
Most activity packs cover the same ground. They just dress it differently depending on the publisher. Snowman building projects dominate this category. You will find instructions for cotton-ball snowmen, salt-dough figures, paper plate characters, and marble painting to simulate snow scenes. These are functional. They take about twenty to thirty minutes depending on materials on hand. The ones that work best use textured paper and blue backgrounds to mimic the cold palette Briggs uses. A lot of the cheaper printables ignore the color scheme entirely and produce results that look like generic winter crafts. That is fine if the goal is just keeping children occupied. It is less useful if you want the activity to connect to the book. I once watched a group spend forty minutes gluing cotton balls while the actual visual language of the book went completely unaddressed. The discussion that followed was empty because nobody had paid attention to the contrast Briggs creates between the gray indoor world and the white outdoor space. If you do the craft, pause during it and point out specific pages. Show them how the snowman appears larger when it is newly formed and how the windows glow yellow against the dark house. The craft becomes about observation instead of just following steps.
Music and Sound
The Pauline Bennett adaptation uses Richard Strauss' Also sprach Zarathustra and other classical pieces. Many activity sheets include music identification tasks or rhythm exercises tied to the scenes. These tend to be the strongest materials because the animation is built around the music. Listening pairs naturally with the visuals. A simple exercise is to play a segment and ask what is happening on screen. Another is to have children tap rhythms that match the pacing of the snowman's journey. The limitation here is that classical music recognition is not intuitive for young children. You should not expect them to name the composer or the piece. What they can do is match tempo to action. Fast music for the flying sequences. Slow music for the penguin scene. This is where the activities succeed. They fail when they try to test factual recall about the music instead of sensory association.
Get the Full Details
Writing and Sequencing
Since the book has no words, writing prompts often ask children to create narration for the story. Some worksheets provide sentence starters. Others ask for a retelling in order. These are genuinely useful if you move past the basic "what happens next" format. The more interesting exercises ask children to write from the perspective of the boy, the snowman, or even the father waking up to find the melted puddle. A common pitfall I noticed repeatedly is that children default to describing the events linearly without adding any emotional content. The story is quiet. It is about imagination and loss. The activities that push for feeling rather than plot summary produce noticeably better writing. Ask what the snowman feels as it flies. Ask why the ending matters. Those questions change the output entirely.
Science Elements
Snow and winter science activities are scattered through most packs. Sorting snowflakes, learning why snow is white, simple experiments with melting ice, and discussing seasons. These are standard primary science topics. The Snowman connection is thin in most cases because the book itself does not engage with science. It engages with imagination. The activities work best when framed as "what would make this story real" rather than pretending the story is a science text. I found that ice-melting experiments paired with the final pages of the book land well. Children watch ice melt while discussing the ending. It creates a tangible link between the narrative and a physical process. The connection only lasts if you actually make it. Otherwise it feels tacked on.
A Real Problem I Hit and How I Worked Around It
We ran a Snowman activity session with a mixed-age group, roughly six to ten years old. The worksheet set we had printed was designed for a single age range. The younger children could not read the sequencing cards. The older ones found the coloring pages insulting. We were stuck halfway through when I realized we needed to split the room immediately. I separated them by ability rather than age. The younger group got the art craft with guided verbal storytelling from two adults. The older group got the writing prompts and music analysis. This cut the session in half in terms of chaos and actually improved engagement across both groups. The lesson is obvious in hindsight but easy to ignore when you are handed a one-size packet and a room full of children who need different things.
Which Activities Are Worth Using
Music matching and perspective-based writing are the ones that consistently produce good results. Art activities are fine for younger children but need adult framing to connect to the book. Science elements are marginal at best unless you deliberately tie them to the ending. Sequencing worksheets are adequate for early readers but add little value for children who already know the story well. The downloadable resources you find online vary widely in quality. Some are professionally designed with clear ties to the text. Many are sloppily made with misidentified music tracks or artwork that does not match Briggs' original illustrations. If you are sourcing materials, check that the images actually resemble the book. A snowman with a carrot nose and top hat is not the same as Briggs' snowman, who is shapeless and wordless. The visual distinction matters for the tone of the story.
What This Approach Cannot Do
Activities based on The Snowman cannot substitute for reading the book or watching the animation. They are supplements. They also cannot handle a group that has not been introduced to the story first. The narrative dependency is too high. If you hand out worksheets cold, the sessions will flounder regardless of how well designed the materials are. Additionally, these activities lean heavily toward winter themes and may feel forced if used outside of the season, though nothing technically prevents that. For children who have sensory processing differences, the cotton glue and textured materials in art activities can be difficult. Having alternative sensory-friendly options ready is practical. Plain paper and markers work fine if you adjust the task to focus on drawing the snowman's form rather than applying materials. The core value of working with this material is the quietness of it. Briggs' story does not shout. The activities should not either. The ones that respect that tone produce the best results. The ones that try to turn it into a high-energy party theme tend to miss what makes the source material work in the first place.
