Snowy Day Activities

How many of you had some snow days this week?  We had a "cold" day on Tuesday which meant my carefully crafted lesson plans were all screwed up, but we are teachers and we are flexible.  :)

This week is all about snow and winter.  I am trying to get as much as possible into these three days together.

We started with some class building and team building activities.  Everyone wanted to share what they did over break so we took some time in the morning to just share.  Once we did that, we were ready to get to work.

We discussed winter and talked about what we like to do in the snow.  (We had lots of snow over break so we were able to tell things we actually did in the snow!)

Then we read "The Snowy Day" by Ezra Jack Keats.  It is a wonderful book.

Then we used Jessica Williamson's list writing activity to write down "Things To Do in the Snow".  I took it a step further and had my students also illustrate their writing.  I folded a piece of paper into four sections and they drew one idea in each section.

We used this activity to stress the importance of how authors and illustrators need to work together.  Their pictures had to match the list they made.

I let the students take home their illustrations, but we hung our list writing on our "Fab Work" bulletin board.

This was a great way to ease back into writing and our writer's workshop time after such a long break.