Winter Wonderland

I love teaching Florida kids about the Winter season. Although it is a hard season to teach in Florida, especially this year, since we don't ever get snow and rarely get really cold weather. Two science experiments that I found on Pinterest this year really helped the kids to understand what snow and cold weather are all about.
The first is called Instant Snow.You can purchase it here if interested.

 The second experiment was perfect since we were learning about the states and changes of matter in science.

Fill balloons with water- small, medium, and large- and place in bowls with the tied side down so it will create a flat surface. Lay something on top of the balloons to create a flat surface on the top as well. Once frozen, remove balloon and stack balls using salt to help them adhere to each other. Cut out decorations with felt and stick to ice. 

The end result...

To help my students understand Winter we do a lot of crafts about snow, snowmen, snowflakes, and we talk about how to stay warm when it's cold outside. Here are some of our projects:

We read the book...and then created our own "puffy" snowmen. To create the puffy effect, mix equal parts of Elmer's glue and shaving cream. We let them dry then decorated with construction paper and wrote a describing sentence about our snowmen.

We made snowmen out of our names...

                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Based on the book All You Need for a Snowman, we created a First, Next, Last picture of the steps to creating a snowman. Some students got really creative!!!

First, the snow falls. Next, it grows. Last, it is finished.

First, it snowed. Next, they made snowballs.
 Last, they decorated it.

                                                                                                            

This was a center they completed on their own. I provided all the pieces and they created their own snowmen.

Some extra activities you can try are editable snowmen. Use powdered donuts, candy corns, and brown icing to create a snowman face. We also made these ornaments for Christmas, but I couldn't resist sharing them in this post. The kids painted snowmen on clear ornaments (blue looks nice too) with white acrylic paint on their hands. Next, they decorated it with paint markers. This is one of my favorite crafts for this time of year!!!

You can go check out this website Make-a-Flake to create online snowflakes from paper. After practicing on the website students can go create and cut out their own snowflakes from paper. I hung our up on our class tree.

Of course I also take this time to talk about animals that live in cold habitats like penguins. We read a lot of books about penguins. Then the students do a step-by-step drawing of a penguin and write some facts about it. To help them with this we completed a tree map.

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