Snow Much Fun!

I was determined to post much more over the month of January, but it is winter after all. I still feel like I am on Christmas break with the on and off snow days. I must say that despite the interruption to daily schedule, the snow has provided much fun. I began the month by introducing Arctic animals to the children such as penguins and polar bears. We practiced tracing, cutting, gluing and painting skills with some fun crafts found at KidsSoup.com. I love that site!

Potato Print Craft

The kids absorbed the information, but the most fun has come from our hands on snow experiences. Here is a look at the winter fun we experienced through out the past month!
        Back in December I discovered these adorable snowman cardboard buckets from the Dollar Bin at Target. I placed one at each seat at my math table along with different clippers and tweezers. I took my dice (available at the dollar store) and placed it in the middle with a bowl full of cotton balls. The children practiced one-to-one correspondence by feeding the corresponding amount of "snowballs" to the snowmen depending on what number they rolled on the dice. I will also add that I adapted the activity for my mom's kindergarten class. Instead of using the dice, I wrote the number words on homemade flashcards. Her kids were learning how the spell the numbers, so this fun activity provided fun practice for them.

 Another fun motor skills activity involving snowballs included some vocab practice. I came across this idea during a Pinterest search. I did not have white poms poms, but I did have different sizes in color. All you do is take 3 different sized containers with large, medium and small written on them. The kids use the tweezers to sort the correct sizes. My class loves these types of activities, and it aided in their vocab and sequencing abilities!

I also have begun working on the 10s family with kids. To introduce 11-20, I found this fun activity involving hot chocolate, and let me tell you that hot chocolate is being consumed in high quantities around here! Brrr, it's been chilly! Anyway, I cut out some mug cutout and glued them to white paper. I slipped them into page protectors and used dry erase markers to change the numbers. The kids found in challenging to pick up the marshmallows with the tweezers, but it was great pre-writing practice! We also practiced our graphing skills with a fun taste test you can find here.

I also updated our SWAT game to fit the season as well as our new alphabet letters we learned this month. My artistic ability is not the greatest, but hopefully you can tell what everything is. The teams for the month were the polar bears vs the penguins.

I also had a class practice tracing and cutting with mittens. My mother had given me a mitten for my bulletin board with this fun poem. Each child colored one mitten with the colors they chose, and the other we lined with cotton to keep our hands warm. It is a longer poem, but by the end of the month the kids knew it. All of them could do the hand motions we came up with as well.

Stripes or dots or sparkling white (jazz hands)

Mittens in winter fit just right (mime putting mittens on)

Wool or cotton, may leather (shrug shoulders)

Mittens warm us in cold weather (hug yourself)

In rainbow colors or darkest black (shield eyes)

Mittens fit in your pocket on in your pack (mime placing mittens in pocket & pack)

Thumbs alone, fingers together (shake each)

Mittens warm us in cold, cold weather (hug and warm yourself up!)

The rest of our snow fun included actually playing with snow from the comfort of our classroom. The first day I placed some snow in a bin on our new science table. The children built a snowman and snow castles. They had a lot of fun exploring with their hands. They liked using the spoons and other tools to keep their hands from freezing.

Even with a mat under the table, the activity was still a bit messy. The next day I put the snow right in our sand and water table. Originally I was using white rice and thinking about switching to Epsom salts, but the kids had so much fun with the real thing (and we have plenty of it!) that I decided to keep it there. They made lots of cool things with our buckets, measuring tools, water wheel and cups.

I've been finding that my class gets bored quickly with the same old same old. I ended up finding neat ideas to keep the snow exciting for the kids. We began with spray bottles full of water and food coloring, and I added water colors and paint brushes to color the snow. My director also found bottled water colors that I watered down and put in cups and watering cans. The kids used paint brushes in the cups and poured the watering cans into the snow. They loved seeing the rainbow colors in the snow. It also provided a nice introduction to mixing primary colors to make secondary colors.

We also had fun experimenting with melting snow. I placed some snow in a muffin tin and sprinkled hot water, cold water, sugar, salt, Creole spice and left one plain to see what melted the quickest. The kids also helped make snowballs that we placed on a magazine, plastic bag, plastic lid, metal pan, felt and a cardboard lid to see what melted the quickest. We also peeked outside to check out the foot prints in the yard. It looks as if the Easter Bunny has been scoping things out to get ready for our Easter Egg Hunt in the spring! Snow may keep us from school some days, but it sure does provide several fun teachable moments!