Winter Sensory Table

I have been spending a lot of time over at my little grand daughter's house watching and playing with her and her new little brother.  

One of the things I put together for her after the first snow this year was a Winter Sensory Bucket.  It was super easy to do.  First of all I took into consideration how much she loves to put things into containers and make noise. 

So I found some little plastic spice bottles that were almost empty and cleaned them out for her.  Then I found some cotton for something soft for her to feel and tear apart.  Next, I put in some silver and white bells for some added fun.  She loves the jingle bells.  She put the bells in the containers and shakes them and smiles.   

I found some plastic arctic animals and penguins at Michaels to add to the bin.  In my basement I found a dalmatian with a scarf on, I'm not sure how that fits in but she likes dogs.  

She is enjoying the table a lot.  She sits and feels the soft cotton and listens to the bells jingle.  She spends a good 20 minutes putting the bells in and out of the containers.    I am working on several skills when we are playing:  1.  Sitting and standing from a chair,  2.  Working on the words in and out, 3.  I name the animals for her,(building vocabulary) 4. Cleaning up when we are finished.  

Of course she is just playing and having fun and that is the most important thing of all.....Learning is fun.      

Snowmen in First Grade

This week we made these adorable snow people in first grade. I love how I gave all the students the same materials and each one turned out unique and special.   We read lots of wonderful stories about snowmen and now we are writing our own stories during writing workshop.  

Revisit this Snowman Activity

The Snow Family Math Lesson

Last year I wrote about this lesson of creating a snowball family after read the story Snowballs by Lois Elhert.  

Anyways I want to improve it just a bit for this year.  I want to make sure I am addressing the common core math standards K.MD.2  Describe and compare measurable attributes.  So I created this worksheet.

Click Here for your FREEBIE :)

Snowballs

Snowman family

 

In class today I read the story, Snowballs, by Lois Elhert.  I love to read stories by Lois Elhert because she lives right here in Wisconsin.  

Anyways we talked about the different snow people she created and how they could make a family.  (We are learning about families in our religion book  right now…..so it is a nice tie in.)

During Math today, we wrote down the names of each person in our family.  Then we counted how many letters were in each name and created a snowman for each person.  So for example, Will has four letters in his name………his snowman will be four snowballs tall. 

When we had all our snow people glued down, we decorated our snow families.   We went around our tables and shared with our classmates the observations we made about our snow graphs.   Many of the children found it funny that their dad was the shortest snow person in the family.