Studying Snowflakes

We live in East Texas.

Snow reaches us once in a blue moon. I think the last time we had snow my girl was 2 or 3 and we only had enough to make a 4 inch high snowman.

We wish we had some snow here, but alas… none. However, just because we don’t have a first hand experience here with snow doesn’t mean we can not have fun learning about it.

Experience Preschool gave us some superb ideas on how to Study Snowflakes here at home.

I love starting our day with a good book. It really sets the tone for the day. I grabbed Snowy Day, a fictional picture book loaded with facts, off my shelf, gathered the kids (and snacks), and we all dived into the snow of our book. Another great picture book would have been Snowflake Bentley, but I had not gone to the library to check it out. I need to add it to our home library. I love how books can take us places and experience things we may have never encountered before.

We learned that snowflakes have 6 points and that each one is unique. No two are the same. We thought about that for just a bit. Every snowflake that falls to the ground is special! As I look at the pictures in this book and think back to when our house was covered in snow years ago, I am just overcome by God’s creativity. Each one is different. This discussion led to our first Experience Preschool activity called “You’re Special.”

We passed around a mirror and each child said something special or unique about themselves. I also chimed in about what I thought was special about them that you couldn’t see in the mirror.

After sitting for awhile, it was time to run and play outside. Just because we don’t have snow here in East Texas, doesn’t mean we can’t have snowflakes on the ground! I took some chalk and we talked about how many points our snowflakes had (6) and what I could do to make each one look different.

After drawing quite a few snowflakes, I played our “Snow Storm” song from Experience Preschool. Whenever I paused the song, they had to stop on a snowflake. I then called a kid to tell me a number and another to tell me an exercise to do. We did squats, toe touches, jumping jacks, and seriously my tush was sore the next day after all the exercise. I am obviously out of shape.

After enough huffing and puffing, and all the wiggles were gone, we ventured back indoors for another Experience Preschool activity- Snowflake Designs.

My teacher guide suggested setting out a tray of salt or sugar so children could draw designs in them. I happened to see a can of shaving cream in my art drawer and thought it would be a great option to write in. I should have given them more space (like a large tray) rather than these little containers. The thickness of the shaving cream made the designs hard to see unlike if it was in a tray of sugar or salt, but we all had fun. We ended up marbling paper with our leftover shaving cream and creating cards, but I didn’t snap any pics of that. Three kids with painted shaving cream everywhere… yeah… nope… no camera. You can check out the process here.

The kiddos were still wanting to paint, so after our shaving cream, we did our Snowflake Invitation to Create. Experience Preschool sent us coffee filters, pipettes and glitter; all I had to supply was watery paint and scissors. All my pictures turned out fuzzy, but you can see the idea.

I folded the coffee filters for the kids (into 8ths…should have been 6ths… hindsight is 20/20) and then they cut their designs out. We then used the watery paint to paint them. After painting, we added some watery glue to our snowflakes so our glitter would stick. Then came the sprinkling of glitter. I tried to teach them how to sprinkle glitter. Ya know, sprinkling is a relative term… dumping is actually more like it. Eh… they’re little.

Whew, what a day. Are you tired after reading all that, because I wanted a nap! My girl had so much fun on our snowflake day that later that evening, she asked if we could make more coffee filter snowflakes. We made over 10. Instead of paint, we colored them with markers and used our pipettes to place water on the colored area. The colors bled beautifully (sorry no pics). Our house is now covered in snowflakes…. here in East Texas where it never snows.

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