The snow continues…

I know many of you missed days of school last week because of the snowfall.  Well, when the snow falls here in ND, life goes on as usual.  It snowed almost every day last week, and we woke up today to more snow on the ground! I saw our poor custodians snow blowing 3 times on Friday!  I’ll have to hop outside today to snap a picture so you can see ALL of the snow.  However, although the air temperature right now is –1 the “feels like” temperature is –20.  Maybe I’ll just take a picture from my window
Here are some of the activities that we did 2 weeks ago.  Last week was the mitten – I am way behind in the blogging department!
This is a fun idea I got from a friend....We started off the week wondering….where is the best place to build  a snowman?  I love #5.  Yep, we certainly have enough snow!  I was leading them to understand that inside is not the greatest place to build a snowman.

So….we went on to talk about what would happen if we built a snowman inside. 
We made predictions in our snowman journal about what could happen.
Then, we got out our mittens and gathered a BIG bucket of snow.  Each table got a tray, snow, buttons, sticks, fabric for a scarf, and a noodle for his nose. 
We put the snow people in different places in our room and observed them throughout the day.  One group even put theirs in the play refrigerator!  We charted what our snow friends looked like about every 90 minutes.  At the end of the day, all we had was snowman soup!  Some children were very sad to see their friends disappear!

Here is one entry a child wrote in her snowman journal about what her snowman looked like:

We also read the book Snowballs by Lois Ehlert and made our own snow people.  The children will also write about what their snowperson, or dog, or cat is but we haven’t gotten around to that yet!

We did our SNOWMAN making words activity.  We do a making words activity every Friday, and the children are getting quite good at it! We sit at the carpet, and they each have a clipboard.  I use my document camera to record the words as we build them as well.

We played this fun sight word game which is available in Kim Adsit’s Snowman pack at TpT.

This rhyming game is also available in Kim’s pack.

This is a CVC word game that is available at Kelly’s Kindergarten.

The children loved Snowman Hangman!!  We sat by our word wall, and I chose a mystery word.  I start off by saying, my word has 3 letters.  They have to scan the word wall to find a word that only has three letters and then they guess the letters.  If they guess a wrong letter, one piece of the snowman goes up. (there are magnets on the back – my word wall is on a magnetic white board).  This idea also came from Kim’s snowman pack.  If you haven’t picked it up yet – you certainly should – there are tons of fun ideas in it!

We also played the smaller, taller, or the same as game…(just call it a game, and it’s more fun for them ).
First we made predictions on whether or not they would be taller, smaller, or the same as our little snowman friend.  Most guesses were right on, but a few were off!

We wrote about it in our snowmen journals:

We read many snowmen books throughout the week. We read Snowman at Night and wrote about what they thought snowman do at night.  I love the first one.  She is such a literal thinker

We read this book:

And listened for the words: first, next, then, last.  We put the words in order and drew the steps it takes to build a snowman.

The children then went off to write their own steps to go with the pictures.

We have been doing math problem solving every day for a few weeks now, and the children are becoming great thinkers!  Each day we write the question, and the children read as I write.  We talk about the important information, and draw a picture to go with it.  I really walk them through the problem so I can target the strugglers.  We always joke that the problem is too easy, and that they are too smart for it.  They LOVE that!!

Here are some samples from their journals:

Here are some other pages from their Snowmen Fun! Journals for the week!

We drew and labeled the parts of a snowman, made a list of the supplies we needed to build a snowman, wrote about what would happen if we built a snowman inside, and wrote about who we would build our snowman with.

Next post, mittens and hot chocolate – although I don’t have many pictures to share for some reason!