A Snowy Day at School

On Wednesday evening, snow was in the forecast. And of course, as a teacher, I get a little (or incredibly) excited when there is any hope of an impending snow day.

Thursday morning arrived and the roads were sprinkled with snow, the temperature was around 20 degrees…but it just wasn’t enough for a snow day. On any other day, I would have been disappointed (I mean..an extra day to clean, do laundry, play with my sweet babies, stay warm…come on, we all want that!). But not today…Today was my first day back after Christmas break! I knew I had 30 sweet little kinders who would be greeting me with tender hugs and huge smiles (several of those smiles with one less tooth than the last time I saw them). I was excited!

My students came in full of smiles and hugs as I imagined, but they were also incredibly excited because of our first accumulated snow! I took a look at my plans and quickly decided to make some simple changes. And by changes, I mean that I basically scrapped most of our typical day and filled it in with learning activities that dealt with snow and ice.

Our Snowy Day in Kindergarten

Thankfully, my classroom is next to the recess doors, so I snuck out for a moment to grab a bucket of snow. I formed a snowball as students watched and put it on a plate and left the plate next to me so students could see it as we read.
For shared reading, we set aside our polar animals books and decided to read The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. Several students were super excited about this because there is currently an animated version of The Snowy Day on Amazon Prime. This is a nice, classic book that also allows us to discuss large cities and aparment buildings, which are very different settings than the 1,200 population village where my kinders live.

In the story, Peter puts a snowball in his pocket to save for later. Before bed, he goes back to look for it in his snowsuit and it had disappeared. I quickly whipped up a writing sheet, cut and paste style, and had my aide run copies for our writing activity.

My kinders first wrote about why Peter’s snowball disappeared. As simple as one might assume that would be, I still had a student that was unable to answer the question correctly. Sometimes those very simple questions really allow you to identify students who struggle with very basic comprehension and reasoning skills.
Next, we discussed what we could do if we really want to save a snowball for later. Some of their ideas:
- Leave the snowball outside
- Put the snowball in the freezer
- Put the snowball in a cooler with a lot of ice and cold stuff
- Make your house as cold as it is outside and bring it in (my personal fav) 🙂
- Some of our ideas needed some extra discussion to allow students to decide whether or not the snowball would make it…
  - Put the snowball in a lunchbox
  - Put the snowball in the fridge
  - Put it in a bag
  - Put it in an ice cream container

I was impressed with my students’ writing and loved how engaged they were in the activity! Interest really does have a huge impact on student work…

I decided that this went over so well that I would create a new writing sheet for next year (if we happen to get snow on a school day!). Click here to download it from my TeachersPayTeachers store for FREE.

After our writing, we observed the snowball and noticed that it had barely melted! This prompted us to predict whether or not the snowball would be completely melted within an hour. It ended up taking almost 3 hours for the entire snowball to melt!!
As a kindergarten teacher, I also think out loud a LOT. I asked, “I wonder if this snowball is taking so long to melt because I put it on a styrofoam plate…?” Naturally, this led to an afternoon experiment as well. Indeed, the styrofoam plate DID cause our snowball to melt more slowly. I also allowed my helper of the day to form the 2nd and 3rd snowballs. 🙂
Sprinkled in throughout the day were several other activities about ice and snow
- We discussed what we wonder about ice and snow and made a list
- We learned about the Harbin Ice castle festival in China (which is really cool…if you’ve never seen it, click here!)
- SciShow Kids video on Youtube- Where Do Snowflakes Come From?
- We ended up making one more snowball to leave outside our recess doors. My kinders wondered if it would still be there the next day… It was! 🙂