This week in kindergarten we learned all about snow! There is only one problem with this...we live in Florida. We started the week by doing a snow dance but the snow gods did not grant us our request. I was amazed that my Florida kinders new NOTHING about snow! They were so excited when I told them what we were going to do this week. Here is the break down -
Day 1: Coming back from the long Christmas break I did a shape review with the students and then they made shape snowflakes. Some of them are very impressive!!! (For those who are wondering we have a shape cutter at our school so I did not cut out each of these shapes for them).
Day 2: The students really wanted to decorate the room with snowflakes so first we watched Crafty Carol (youtube) teach us how to make a paper snowflake. (Side note: My students LOVE Crafty Carol and Mrs. Booksy - great for a little break during the day). I taught them how to make their own paper snowflakes. We slowly went step by step but the students loved seeing their final snowflake creations. I hung them from the ceiling so that it feels a little more like winter in our 80 degree weather!
Day 3: We looked outside and still...no snow *tear*. I did the only thing I could think of...an ice snowman. The students took turns putting together our ice snowman (we named him Olaf OF COURSE!). As you can see our middle part fell but that didn't stop my students...they were determined to have a snowman!
I took this time to talk about solids vs. liquids and we documented in our science journals what Olaf looked like before and after. Pictures are below. The kids were very sad to see Olaf go and even more sad when they asked where he was the next day and I told them he went down the drain...poor Olaf.
Day 5: What better way to finish off our week learning about snow then by having our very own snowball fight! The students had a blast with this and didn't even realize they were learning in the process! Our snowball fight helped us work on ending sound. Here's how it works:
(1) Give each student a piece of paper with a picture on it
(2) Space the students out around the classroom
(3) Tell the students to crumble up their papers (they are
going to have a snowball fight!)(4) Tell the students to start throwing their snowballs when they hear the music (I played Let It Snow).
(5) When the music stops the students quickly find a snowball and freeze
(6) When you tell them to the students open their snowballs and try to figure out the ending sound of the picture they have.
(7) Students walk to the correct ending sound letter that is posted around the room.
(8) Teacher checks if correct.
Repeat as many times as you would like. My students wanted to keep playing until I finally said enough!
You can get this game for free here at my TeachersPayTeachers store:
That's all for now. Thanks for reading my first post! More to come later!
