Beware of the Yellow Snow...men

Source: makeandtakes.com via Julie on Pinterest

Here is another Winter thing that we had at school this week.  I got this idea from...can you guess?  Yes, Pinterest it was.  I thought these little magnet snowmen were such a good idea that I would try to make some myself.

Of course, I must admit that I didn't actually read the original instructions on how to make these cute little guys.  I just saw them and said, "Hey, I've got this."  And I kind of did, but in hindsight their way of doing it was much better than mine.

My way was to use a paper punch to cut out circles from white cardstock.  Then I drew the little snowmen faces on the white circles.  I then used glue to adhere clear flattened marbles to the snowman face.

Their way was to paint the snowmen faces onto the back side of the magnets.

Reason their way was better: Their snowmen faces were nice and crisp.  Mine - not so much, because I at first used a water-based marker to draw the carrot noses (because I did not have an orange Sharpie).  Unfortunately, regular marker + glue = complete carrot smudge.  Once I figured this out, I drew the noses with colored pencil, which still didn't get a very vivid result.

Then there were the flattened marbles.

Their way was to use smaller marbles.  Very cute and concise.

My way was to use the larger size of marbles.  Actually, they really are a nice size for the Little People.  They just feel more - substantial than the smaller ones.

Unfortunately, I decided to go cheap and get my marbles from the local dollar store.  I knew when I bought them that they weren't very clear, but unfortunately, once they were glued on and dry they were worse than clear:  they were yellow.

So sadly, my cute little snowmen magnets were now Yellow Snow Magnets, and we all know what Yellow Snow means.  They weren't even evenly yellow.  They all kind of have yellow streaks running through them, which make them look like they were - well, streaked with yellow.

However, perhaps the Little People do not know about the Yellow Snow, because most of them have never seen snow of any kind.  As a result, they played and played with them  today.

So remember, follow instructions on new projects, don't eat the yellow snow...and don't make snowmen out of them, either.

Snowmen Windsocks

Another fun Winter activity that we did this week was our Snowmen Windsocks.  This is another one of those activities that is definitely on the “crafty” side of things, but I still like it for the sheer value of how they look when they’re all hanging from the ceiling.  Plus, it turns into a nice conversation about mouths, noses, eyes (and carrots) for those English Language Learners.

The main part of the activity that the kids get to do is draw their snowman faces.  Last year’s class had a lot more trouble drawing the faces where they needed to be on the paper, so this year we tried a trick to help them find the right place.  We gave them a 9 x 12 piece of white construction paper for the body.  Then we covered up the sides of the paper with two scrap pages of paper (not white), so they could only see the middle third of the piece of paper.  Then we had them draw the snowman face only in that exposed area.  This really helped them hone in on where to put everything .  I think they did a super job on them – only one drew a round head and then filled in the face parts, and we had a lot more of that last year.  Then they turned their white papers over and used a glue stick to glue on six or seven strips of colored paper. (Mine were 1" wide and 15" long.)

Later that night (during Teacher TV Time, which is my usual time to work on my teacher jobs) I glued on the hats.  The hats are black construction paper cut to 3"x12".  You cut into the rectangles as shown - cut on the solid lines, and fold on the dotted line.

Then you glue the hat on the top of the head, being careful not to glue the flap down.

Snowman not drawn to scale :)

After you do this, you can "roll' them up into a tube and then glue them this way.  If the flaps are folded, they will stick out like so:

Then you can punch holes on either side of their little snowmen heads and tie yarn to it for hanging.

Here they all are, ready for transport to school...all set to blow in the breeze of our classroom.

Well, Winter Fun continues on at school this week.  We’ve done several different Winter activities as the sun shines every day and the temperatures waft up around the mid-sixties.  However, we’re determined to Keep Calm and Winter on, and so we do just that.

One of our activities was to make these name snowmen that I had seen on Pinterest.

Obviously, the idea is for the Little People to write one letter on each “snowball” and then stack them up to make their complete name as a complete Snow Person.   Of course, for people who are just learning to write their names, this can be a daunting task to assign each of these still-foreign letters to any paper, much less one-per-snowball.  However, we managed to make it work just fine.

What we did is to prepare a short sentence strip for each child with small post-it notes on it – one for each letter of their name.  So, for example, Suzie would have a sentence strip with five blank post-it notes lined up on it.  Then, when we sat down with the child, we would write the letters of their name on the post-it notes, talking about what each of their letters were, and how many there were in the name, etc.  After we did that, we attached each post it with its now-written letter to the edge of a paper snowball, so they could copy each letter one at a time.   With very few exceptions, they were all able to copy their letters well, one at a time in the order that they went in.

Later I glued the snowballs together, and then the next day they made their faces and chose their crepe paper scarves.

One of my favorite parts of the activities was when the kids later wandered over to the art table where we had put out different sizes of white circles and started making their own name snowmen:

 Here they are, all lined up on our bulletin board like a little snowman picket fence.

Fun, seasonal, and with a purposeful - an all around good project.