Playing with Snow

It's been fun to use snow as a theme for our learning recently, especially since we've had some outside to work with. Here are some of the ways that we've been using snow to play and learn.

Snow Painting

Combining process art with sensory play. :)

Building Snow People

After one small storm the snow was perfect for building snowmen...and snowgirls.

Throwing "Snowballs"
We made some pretend snowballs out of crumpled paper, and used them for some letter recognition and sound practice. For one game, I hid sticky notes inside the snowballs with letters on them. After a round of snowball throwing, each student would open up a snowball, name the letter inside, and then crumple it back up for someone else to find. For another game, I taped both letters and numbers onto the snowballs and we sorted them by deciding whether it was a letter or number, and then throwing them into different containers.

(hard to get a good picture of this activity)

Epsom Salt Crystal "Snow" Painting
We also tried our hands at using Epsom salt to do some crystallized painting. It had been years since I've tried this activity, and I didn't quite get the ratio of salt to water right at first. But in the end, crystals formed on most of our paintings and it was neat to observe that process.