Snowmen- a crafting and creating Linky

we went back to school today and already we are waiting to hear on a snow day tomorrow or not. the snow is coming down heavily! What a way to start 2014!

I love coming back in January! One of my most favorite themes is snow and snowmen. Here are just a 1/4 of my books I use! My absolute favorites are If it is Snowy and you know it Clap Your Paws and I love Snowflake Bentley!

And because it is a new month and a new calendar our daily song has changed! Each month, I change the song that they do during calendar time. This is a brain break that we do every day at the same time. They love it! The brain break that goes along with our January calendar is dancing with the snowman- doing the Macarena! Here are the kids dancing along with the snow man!

Here is the video embedded and the link to it in Youtube!

The link is Dancing Snowman
Now for the crafting and creating part of my post! I am linking up for day 2 of the 2014 Linky with Blog Hoppin!

Today we created Snowmen! My how they enjoyed this! I do not like to teach writing without providing them with an experience to write about or to make the writing more meaningful. So today, we began our writing lesson with the creation of a snowman. The students all got one blue piece of paper. They were not allowed to use paint brushes. They used their hands. Well, I always create an example of what I am asking them to create in a large form. Here is my example:

First thing I do is I walk around and squeeze three small blobs of paint on their paper- one at top for the head, one in the middle for the second snowball and one at the bottom for the third snowball. They were then instructed and it was modeled to create three balls by using their fingers and swirling the blobs into snowballs. Here they are doing this step:

Then once everyone is done with their snowballs, They wash up and I read a snowman book to allow time for their snowballs to dry. This does not take long and they are normally dried by the end of the story. I then go around and with the black paint, draw the outline of the hat. The students are then instructed and it is modeled to fill in and create a snowman hat with their fingers. they are then shown and told to use the black paint from their hat to make the eyes, mouth and buttons. They are given a funky orange ribbon to cut and make into a nose. This is glued onto the snowman's face. Here are some pictures of this step:

After this step, they clean their hands again and we start to talk about how we have created or built our snowmen so far. We discuss this using the words first, then, next and last. This is what their writing portion of the activity will be. This conversation allows the hat and other parts to dry some.

The next step is the scarf. I go around and squirt red paint across the neck of the snowman. they are then instructed and it is modeled to create a scarf using the red paint and their fingers. It is demonstrated to run their fingers across the neck and then off to the side twice to create the scarf.
They then wash their fingers when they are done and return to their seats to do the last step and that is the arms. I go around and squirt two blobs of brown paint on on each side of the second snowball. they are instructed to and modeled make the sticks by taking their fingers and drawing a straight line with the brown paint on each side and then add additional lines coming off to make sticks. Once they do this, their snowman is complete. Here are some of the completed snowmen:

The next step is to create a how to writing piece on How To Build A Snow an! I will post their writing tomorrow!