Playing in the snow is so much fun! While I am not a huge fan of the long prairie winters, my children
absolutely love it. They go snowboarding, ice skating, and spend hours outside making snowmen, building igloos, and having epic snowball fights.
One of the things I love to do is to give them bottles filled with food colouring and water, and send them out with instructions to draw me something related to what we are learning. They love to run outside to find their own patch of freshly fallen snow, and draw their masterpieces.
Snow is also a great way to teach multiple lessons. Recently, I used snow to teach the little kids at the Homeschool Coop Kindergarten all about the Letter S.
We started out the lesson with a few books on snow. Snowmen At Night was a great story about what snowman do when all the kids are sleeping. It’s a really fun story with a nice lighthearted message. The next story we read was 10 On The Sled. This is a great book that follows the rhyme of 10 In The Bed to learn about numbers. The last book that we read was, Snow by Dr.Seuss. This is a whimsical look, in classic Dr.Seuss manner, that explores the wonderful landscape and activities that snow allows.
We then used the worksheets from my Letter Lessons Pinterest Board for the Letter S. There are so many great FREE printables that you can find. I especially liked the S for Snowman, and the Snowman, Snowman What Do You See? Mini Booklet.
I like to have all my lessons cover all of the subjects. So I printed out these awesome Snowflake Tangram Worksheets for math. The kids enjoyed trying to make all the fun designs with all the different coloured tangrams. I didn’t actually have enough for all the kids to finish all their designs – so one little girl just started to colour in with the colours she was missing. Ingenuity at it’s finest!
After the kids were done building their snowflakes with tangrams, we moved on to the main event. I love doing science experiments with all my kids as much as possible; and kindergarten is no different. We did the very simple experiment of Growing Our Own Crystal Snowflakes with Borax and hot water. I had never done this experiment before so I was worried that they would not turn out. I also had to leave them for a week because our Coop only meets every Tuesday. When I came back the next week I was pleasantly surprised; the snowflakes turned out beautifully.
Lastly, I needed something for the kids to do while I helped to finish up the snowflakes. Polymers to the rescue! If you have never used this before you need to go get some. Kids love it! I used all of mine up in my Rainbow Snow lesson, so I needed to buy a whole lot more from Amazon for this class. The kids spent so much time playing with it, and I was able to explain why it works. The best thing about these polymers is that they shrink right back so that you can use them over and over. Just make sure that the kids wash their hands before and after use so that it isn’t not a breeding ground for bacteria.
We had so much fun learning all about the Letter S and Snow. Do you have any great resources for learning about Snow? Any great wintertime stories? Make sure you share them in comments.
Have a great time learning with your kids!
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