Animals in the Winter

This year, our winter study mainly focused on what animals do when it gets so cold.

Migration, Hibernation, and Adaption

We talked about how different animals respond to the cold weather. Some migrate to warmer places, some sleep, and some find ways to adapt and survive.

We read several nonfiction books about real animals that inspired some of our explorations.

This student was interested in the homes that beavers stay in during the winter months, and built one of his own using loose parts.

We also read many fiction stories about animals in the winter, including some that are silly and imaginative. But even books that are just pretend help us to think about what it might be really like to live outside in the winter time. 

The traditional story of the Mitten was one of our favorites. It inspired some retelling activities, and a favorite alphabet game during music time. 

We would hide the mitten under a letter, sing a little song, and then make guesses about where it might be. The kids loved finding and hiding it over and over again. 

We also thought about the different kinds of tracks animals leave in the snow

Hibernation is always a favorite topic during this unit, and the kids loved dramatic play in the "Bear Cave."

We used our spinning art from earlier in month as a background for this simple snowy bear craft.

Math Game: How many bears in the cave?

I love using this math game when talking about hibernating bears because it's so great for building number sense and 1:1 correspondence. We count out a certain number of bears, hide some, and try to figure out how many are hiding. 

Learning with Snow

January started out really dry, but we finally got a good snowstorm so that we could do some snowy winter activities.

Outdoor Play

We had a lot of snow out in the yard, which led to a lot of gross motor activities like shoveling and rolling balls for a "snowman city."

Snow Art and Sensory Play

My favorite thing to do in winter is to bring the snow inside to use as a learning tool. We used it for sensory play, science exploring, and art. 

For our art project, we ripped up pieces of bleeding tissue paper and then scooped snow on top to see what happened as it melted.

  The colors of the tissue paper started to bleed and mix together as the snow liquefied.  

We let them dry over a few days, and the melted snow and paper left behind some beautiful colors and designs.

To finish them off, we added some puffy paint to the designs. 

I was glad we had at least one good storm in January so that we could use real snow during our study of winter!

Happy New Year!

As often happens during the holiday season, I got pretty caught up in everything going on and behind in blogging, so we are starting fresh with the new year!

A New Year

The concept of time, months, years, etc. is still pretty abstract for preschool aged children, but we did spend a little bit of time thinking about the new year in our own way. We explored some calendars, thought about the different things that happen during the different months of the year (birthdays, holidays, seasonal weather, etc.), and how the months happen in the same order and cycle through every year.

Winter

This month our main focus will be on the season of winter. There are so many things to explore in each season, that every year looks a little different depending on what is actually happening in our area and what the students are interested in. This year we haven't had much snow yet, so we began by thinking about the colder temperatures.

We used water beads to explore changes that happen when something freezes.  

 After spending some time with our regular water beads, we put some of them in the freezer. The beads looked and felt quite differently after they froze, and the kids came up with a lot of good observations and questions as they explored like, why do the beads stick together when they are frozen? Why do they feel harder? This was a great introduction into different states of matter.

Hot Chocolate Math

As we've talked about the things we can do to stay warm in the winter, one favorite is hot chocolate. This is a simple math game that we play to practice one-to-one correspondence and counting those tricky teen numbers. 

Waiting for Snow

We read a book about some animals who try all sorts of silly things to get it to snow, but in the end they just have to wait for snow to come when it does. It seemed a fitting book for this year, and we'll just keep playing with our own kinds of "snow" until we get some to explore outside. 

One class became very interested in creating snow with paper punches.

We made a snowy world on the light table.

And we've been doing different kinds of winter inspired art, like this snowy spin art project.