Snowflake Snowmen and Winter Poems

We've had a lot of snow in Utah lately. It is fun to write winter acrostic poetry and make Snowflake Snowmen,  on a particularly snowy day.

Our cute Snowflake Snowmen turned out great! 

Have you ever heard of Snowflake Bentley? He did a book in the early 1900s of snowflake pictures from an old fashioned camera. He found that no two were ever alike. I showed the kids the book about his life and the book of pictures he published of hundreds of snowflakes. I own both of these books. They are awesome!

I have a monthly WORD BANK I put up with words the kids might use in their winter writing.....Each month the shape changes as well as the words. 

Word Work Activities and Poetry/Songs
At ABC Teach  there are some cute snow similes to start everybody thinking about great words to describe the winter season.  It is a great warm up. Here's a poem we read as a chant or rap using drums and bongos and snapping our fingers.

Snowflake Poem we rap to.....

ACROSTIC POEMS: 
Then after that we make a giant list of W words, then I words, then N words on the board as the kids help by brainstorming. Then we start writing the acrostic phrases or sentences (depending on how you want to differentiate) or lower grades could just copy the word.

These 2 songs are really fun to sing. I have percussion instruments and 3 xylophones that the kids can play to the songs. It's a good way to do some shared reading with an element of fun in rereading the text. 

This song is fun to start out standing in a squat and then growing as you sing "tall, tall, tall", and then when you are melting go back down to the squat slowly while singing "small, small, small....". 

I had to include this cute picture of my grandbabies with their daddy constructed snowman. Cute right? 

SHAVING CREAM FUN:
Then after recess I bring out shaving cream and press about a golfball or bigger sized lump on top of everybody's desk. Then I read them Katy and the Big Snow. They are the snowplowers (using their fingers) as we travel to Geopolis and do North, South, East and West using a N or S or E or W written in the
"snow" which is the shaving cream. They smooth it all over their desks and then draw a map of the city using fingertips. I wish I would have snapped a few pictures. By the time the story is over the room smells great and the desks are really clean. We wipe them off with a paper towel (not much cream is left after mooshing it all over for 5 minutes!). It is always a fun winter activity we do. I just ordered the Fancy Nancy winter book. It looks like fun too.

Here are some of my January classroom decorations I put out in place of all the cute Christmas ones. 

Cute Snowflake Snowmen....made from handmade paper snowflakes...no two are ever alike! 

January Snowmen decorate the classroom today.....

After everybody has the WIN of winter, we move to T words, then E words then R words. I write them horizontally and then write the words the kids come up with vertically under each letter. My class make their own sentences after choosing one of the words to start the phrase or sentence.
Cute bulletin board set I love.....

Here is my Winter bulletin board with just a few of the songs I put up to sing throughout the month of January.

Then we do a fun art project using a 7, and 6 inch cut out circles of white, and a 5 inch circle head for "SNOWFLAKE SNOWMEN". After showing the kids how to fold the snowflake circle into a pie shaped piece and cut the edges into SNOWFLAKES we make our snowmen on LIGHT BLUE  paper.

The hat for the SNOWFLAKE SNOWMAN is 31/2 square in black with a 1 x 5 inch brim for the cute little  craft. 

We had lots of fun making snowman art and stamping snowflakes with white paint.....

Cutest winter bulletin board of the year I think.....now we just have to write our Snowman Stories!  

Here is a sample!! Then we add snowflakes using white paint and some stamps we got at Lakeshore Learning    Oriental Trading  also has some cute ones Here.

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Lastly the kids did a pattern on the scarf using small squares of construction paper about a centimeter size. And they added buttons from the same squares and colored in the cheeks on the face. They also added the twig arms and a strip of color on the black hats. This year I got some metallic colored squares and I think that might make a more glittery look

.Here are the CARDSTOCK MOSAIC SQUARES or just cut your own out of strips of centimeter sized construction paper. Then have the kids snip their own squares....they can do it.


Then lastly we do snowman stories just for some creative writing fun. Each snowman must have a personality. So they have to be really good at some kind of snowman talent. Then they have to also have a problem, a solution, a setting (city somewhere in the U.S.) and lots of describing words.

I'll post our stories  soon. They are always very fun to read.