Snowflakes first

I'm ready to start back in January.  To get the kids ready I will ease back into activities with making snowflakes.

Paper snowflakes
Use coffee filters and fold into fourths.  Real snowflakes have six sides but it is too thick for them to cut yet.  Show the children how to cut triangles tall, wide, short, skinny patterns along the edges.  I encourage them to make two.  One to decorate our classroom and another to take home.  

Before Christmas I had the children trace their hands in white and make multiple hand shapes over the course of days.  I stapled three together to make snowflakes for our classroom door display.  Green hands were used to make a pine tree with the lighter green hands holding a heart with the student's pictures in the center.

Some years I've made full snowmen with all their white hands.  And green hands to make an evergreen winter tree with white hand snowflakes.

Snowglobes
This project is done in stages over 2-3 days.  Show sample globes and writing is done at a center along with doing step by step craft.  This gives time for the snow paint to dry as you will see.  

• I take pictures of each student acting out playing in the falling snow.  Pretend you're catching snowflakes on your tongue.  Pretend you can catch a snowflake on your hand/mitten. Some years I have had them dressed in their snowclothes for the picture.

I cut out their picture for them. 

• A circle is pretraced to fit the clear plate size just a slightly larger line for cutting line is drawn.

• A trapezoid shape is cut out and the circle is glued to the base.  We do the writing project to glue on to this base prior to doing the circle part.

• Then we make a mini pine tree from a 3-inch square.  See post in December where we made 9-inch square pine trees folding on the diagonal. We glue the tree on the circle.

• We mix white paint and shaving cream and glue to make a fluffy snow which is painted on adding a few snowflakes in the sky.

A clear plastic plate is splattered with white paint and a toothbrush (I do that).  I found them at Target.  They don't have any printed words on the bottom.
Then with a hot glue gun, I assembled their creation to look like they ARE in a snowglobe!

• If I lived in a snowglobe writing projects. 

Using our five senses, we talk about what we would see, hear, taste, smell and feel if we lived in a snowglobe. 
I bring in small snowglobes that I have collected for those who may not have ever seen one.  
Living life in a bubble.  It is interesting how some can imagine and some just copy.  They think it's fun anyway.

Counting snowflakes.  
*We have ten frames with snowflakes to count and show numbers.  Use dry erase boards to write the number I show using the ten-frames.
*We count groups of snowflakes and put them in order.  This is an activity that lends itself to easy differentiation for ability groups.  Some groups can start at a higher number to practice counting on from the smallest number (11-20).  Some groups need to have a one to start from to do 1-10.
*Use snowflake stamps to stamp out the number.
*Make snow scene cards for the students to count sets or to follow a story problem to solve.  You can use erasers for counters or print out snowflakes on cardstock, laminate and cut for quick counters.

Snowflake words
*Print sight words on snowflakes.  
*Make memory matching games.  
*Write the room looking for sight words on the snowflakes.
*Use the words to build sentences.  

*Copy winter words describing winter weather.

Use different color markers and then Q-tips in white paint for the snowflakes.  

Science observing a cup of snow melting.  Place cups in various parts of the room and record observations. 

And then there are Reading stories about snowflakes .....coming soon my favorites.

Then we will move on to making snowmen...more activities coming up so wait and watch.....