Winter Teaching Theme Ideas and Activities

Lesson Introduction

We had a “mystery bag” and we had to guess what was in it. Hmmm, it must have been a snowman that melted because the girl has the carrot nose and the boy has a button. This was our introduction to learning about the winter season.

He even found a piece of ice in the bag from the snowman.

Melt-an-Ice Cube Game

This idea came from Barb on the Teachers.net chatboard. Each child had an ice cube on his plate. (I’d recommend small cubes for the game.) Each child rolls a die in turn and follows the directions to try to be the first one to melt his cube. From this Ice Cube game the children learn that salt, warm water, warm air and warm hands help ice melt faster. (They also learned that ice feels really cold!)

They loved this game!
Click here to print out the Melt-an-Ice Cube Game.

Rolling a 3 means you have to blow on the cube for 10 seconds.

A
5 calls for putting 10 shakes of salt on the cube.

Rolling a 6 means you have to float your cube in water for 10 seconds.

Rolling a 1 meant you had to hold your cube for 10 seconds to try to
melt it faster. A 4 meant you could drop your cube and try to break
it into smaller pieces so it would melt more quickly. But this poor
child rolled a 2–oh, oh! A 2 meant you had to put the cube down
your shirt–that was just for extra fun.

Animals in Winter

Click the link above for information on Hibernation (including Hibernation Day), Migration,
and animals that stay active during the winter months.

We
wore costume cards (or you could make headbands) of the characters
from Jan Brett’s “The Mitten”. The children crawled into a pretend
mitten (on the right). These cards can be found on Jan Brett’s
website:

http://www.janbrett.com/mitten_masks_main.htm

There is also a mitten and animal characters for the children to
color:
http://www.janbrett.com/put_the_animals_in_the_mitten.htm

Sight words were written
on two mittens and children matched them during a game.

This is a phonemic
awareness activity from CTP’s book and CD Winter Phonemic Awareness.

We made a snowman by
gluing a large and small paper plate together. Yarn was taped to the
back of the plate to attach the bunny. We used this snowman to act
out the rhyme “A Chubby Little Snowman.” The rhyme was glued to the
snowman’s tummy.

The Chubby Little Snowman

A chubby little snowman

Had a carrot nose.

Along came a bunny

And what do you suppose?

That hungry little rabbit

Looking for his lunch

Ate that little snowman’s
nose…

Nibble, nibble, CRUNCH!

We
had a snowball fight. I wrote sight words on paper and crumpled them
up. The kids threw them back and forth and, after about 30 seconds, I
had them open them and read the words. We did this several times. I
saved these snowballs and we had another fight in June.

Maureen Tumenas from Kinderkorner graciously offered to share her winter-related books on my website. Even though the pages
aren’t numbered, they are designed to be printed back to back,
placed on top of each other and then folded in half. You will need
Adobe Acrobat Reader to open both books.

My Snowman

Snowman, Snowman

This is a book relating to the 5 senses in the Brown Bear type of
pattern.

This Igloo game mat was
created by Sherry on the Kinderkorner chatboard.  Put a marshmallow
(or white pompom on each block of the igloo for each flashcard that
was read.

After these snowmen were
fingerpainted the students wrote a sentence describing their
snowman.

These are storyboard from
Box It or Bag It math, the one on the left for polar bears and the
one above for penguins. The manipulatives are painted lima beans.

Miniature marshmallows
were used as pretend snowballs to compare sets on this sledding work
mat .

Using pattern blocks to make winter pictures

Playing the Roll
A Snowman Game

Concentration game matching pictures of Jan Brett characters from
“The Mitten”

Use snowman erasers to
cover the mittens as a die is rolled and the dots are counted.
Thanks to Marcia for this mitten math mat:

http://www.marcias-lesson-links.com/Mitten%20Math%20Mat.pdf

That’s a 12 written in
the upper left corner. First a snowman is stamped. Then 12
snowflakes are stamped. Numbers can be written in the centers of the
flakes.

These students are
stacking cubes on mittens. Then they get to sneeze (just like the
bear in “The Mitten”) and blow the cubes down.

This snowflake headband
features fun foam snowflakes in an AB pattern.

These snowmen are taped to large craft sticks. Initial sound
pictures were printed on them. They are “stuck” into a few bags of
small beans inside the tub. This makes them stay upright. It’s
self-checking because the initial sound letter is written on the
bottom of the stick (which can’t be seen through the beans.) The
children say the name of the picture, pull it out and check to see
if they were correct.

These snowman puzzles
have the initial letter written on the hats. The children find a
medium and large ball with pictures to match the beginning sound.

Matching sentence strips by color  to order and copy sentences.

This is difficult to see,
but animal footprints have been pressed into Crayola model magic to
look like footprints in the snow. These footprint impressions can
also be placed under paper and rubbed with the side of a crayon to
make the footprint.

Match capital and lower case letters by placing  bow ties on
penguins.

These snowmen and the snowflake below are from TLC Art’s Winter
book.

These Eskimo locker
decorations were copied on cardstock A small cupcake paper was glued
on the head and a circular picture was glued inside. They were
trimmed with cotton balls the children stretched to fit. This idea
came from Linda Critchell:
http://www.kinderteacher.com

A paper plate was covered with foil for the background. Sugar cubes
are the iceberg and a toothpick cut in half served as this walrus’s
tusks,

This snowman windsock
pattern was in the Mailbox magazine, but it could be easily
duplicated. Hold a  9″X 12″ piece of white construction paper
horizontally. Color approximately a 2 1/2″ black band across the
top. Draw a face and buttons in the center. Cut a slit in both side
of the black to make the hat base that sticks out. Fold into a
cylinder and staple or glue. Add colorful rainbow streamers.

Camouflage was demonstrated by finding a place to “hide” an Ellison
cut polar bear.

A frosted oreo, miniature marshmallows, brown M&Ms and a raisin
created this edible polar bear .

Snowman
on a Stick

Ingredients:

kebob
skewers, marshmallows, fruit roll-ups, mint cookies, Rollos candy, icing
and gel icing.

Thread the Rollo, cookie, and the marshmallows on the skewer.
Between the top two marshmallows,  wrap a fruit roll-up strip
for the scarf. Icing keeps the hat pieces together. They may need
help  with the gel icing  details for the face and
buttons.