Snow Days & A Freebie

Happy snow days, everybody!

We have had a pretty big snow storm here in Maryland. My husband took a time-lapse video of the snow falling in our back yard. He has described it to me and it sounds pretty cool. Here it is:

That took about 28 hours for those 28 seconds. That's a lot of snow, isn't it? Our county has closed schools all week so far. 

Here is the view from our front porch:

When we finally do go back, I plan to read this book:

Snowmen at Night

I love connecting the children's experiences to learning. I really want to find out what they did over their long break and how they played in the snow. Of course we are going to write about it and draw illustrations to match our writing. This book is especially wonderful at capturing children's imaginations with the beautiful illustrations and rhyming text. When I was little, I often thought snowmen had their own secret life at night, just like in this story. A few years ago, I read this story to my kids and they were really interested in how the snowmen did all these secret games when nobody was looking. Then I had the cutest little girl raise her hand after we finished. When I called on her, she said "Wait a minute... Snowmen don't HAVE feet!" It was funny to me that out of all the things that the snowmen were doing, that she focused on that one element. I still use that phrase today with my husband whenever something is strange.

I also just made these winter vocabulary cards. I plan to put them in the writing center so children can make their own little stories and books. You can download it for free with the down arrow link. Enjoy!

Vocabulary Words - Winter by Sharon A Blachowicz Dudley

Stay safe and warm!

Snowman Action Book

This is a book that I made for my kindergarten class a few years ago.  Since the snow is coming, I thought it would be a great resource for others to use in January.  Some things I did after printing out the book to use with my kids were: highlight high-frequency words in the book, have them re-write the sentence, share reading the book with 3 other students in the classroom, and take the book home and read to siblings or parents.

Snowman Action Book

Snowman Numbers

As I was shopping in the grocery store with a sighted companion, we found the cutest little marshmallow snowmen.  I thought "What a wonderful way to make math time magical!"  I made the following number line as a PowerPoint file:

Snowman number line from 0 to 10

Not only does placing the marshmallows on the number line teach one-to-one correspondence, but it really holds my students' attention, helping them to focus on each individual numeral.  Some of my students also started to understand "Oh, 5 is one more than 4."  Having been a kindergarten teacher for 17 years, I know that it's vital to help younger students learn their numbers from 1 to 10.  My students often say how much they love math, especially when it's something that they can see, smell, touch, and finally eat at the end of the lesson.

A kindergarten teacher at my school saw me doing this and asked for something more sophisticated, so I made her a sheet for 1 to 35 with the same snowmen, for her to use with the marshmallows.

Snowman counting sheet from 1 to 35 in rows of 5

Take a look at this product on Teachers Pay Teachers!

Numeral Recognition With Snowmen

My pre-k students are excellent counters.  However, they have trouble matching numerals to objects.  I found a great winter song on iTunes called "Six Little Snowmen" by LifeWay Praise Kids.  It counts backwards from six to one, and has each snowman melt as the sun comes out (a great science link).  I went to Michael's Art & Craft and got six plush snowmen.  I then put little, laminated and brailled necklaces on each snowman.

Plush snowmen wearing teacher-made number necklaces

The children use these snowmen also in Math Center and sing the song independently.  I like using things that the children can feel and interact with.  The literature link that I used after the song and counting activity was Frosty The Snowman.  It's a really good book based on the classic song "Frosty The Snowman" by Bing Crosby.