Making SNOW and Doing the "Snow Dance"!

Touch and Feel was all about cotton batting.  Since our theme is winter and snow, we, of course, talked about how this was different than snow and ways that it was the same as snow.  The kids are really learning to compare and contrast things in different ways. They are able to talk about color, how things feel, and temperature with very little prompting.

Today we taught the children some VERY important new vocabulary....in fact, these words are SUPER, VERY important for children in school.  We learned what a snow dance was....and we learned what a snow day means.  I can't really apologize for teaching these terms because as a teacher they are never far from my own winter vocabulary!

Our book today was Snow Dance by Lezlie Evans.  It's a book about children who really want it to snow so that go outside and start their own snow dance.  They dance and sing and jump around....and....before they know it, it is starting to snow!  They spend the afternoon playing in the snow and then, when it snows all night long.....school is cancelled the next day and they have a snow day.  It is a cute book that gives lots of verbs about things to do in the snow like sledding, tasting, dancing, and stomping.

After the story, we passed out musical instruments and made our own snow dance.  There were drums and horns and shakers and bells.....we chanted SNOW SNOW SNOW and LET IT SNOW....just like in our video example.  It was noisy and the kids sure did like it, but.....no snow came!  We decided that we would try every day and see if we wished REALLY hard....maybe....just maybe....we would get to see some snow in January!

We did some science today that was really neat!  Ms. Tiffany and I  had done some research about making "snow" by using the stuff that's inside of diapers.  So, this morning before the kids got to school, we spent a little time scraping that material out of 25 diapers.  (For the record, this is not as easy as it sounds!)  We passed that around to the children and talked about how it felt and some ways it was similar and different to real snow.  Then we added some cold water.  Once that material got wet.....it got cold and started to stick together.  You could build things with it and make snowballs....kinda.  Each child had a small pile to play with at the table and, I promise they would have played in that little bit of "snow" for an hour!  They loved it!  Now....in usual preschool fashion...it was super messy....but, you know us....anything for the sake of new learning!