Snowman Reading/Writing Activity

Hi everyone! If any of you are doing snow or snowman units, I wanted to share this activity that I made last year for my kids. It took a lot of work to make, but it was worth it because they loved doing it! What I did first is print out a blank snowman picture. That was the easy part. Next, in Publisher, I uploaded a whole bunch of images of mittens, hats, scarves, carrot noses, buttons, etc. I sized them so that they would fit pretty well over the snowman picture. Next, I made text boxes over each image and typed in some of the words my students were working on in reading. I actually made three versions of this, because I had my third, fourth and fifth graders learning two different levels of sight words, and my first and second graders working on CVC words.

It was more of an activity than a game. They would pick out the clothing and facial features they wanted and place them on the snowman frame. (I laminated everything so we could use it again... I didn't add velcro or anything, they just laid it where they wanted it to go.) When their snowman was complete, they had to read all of the words they used to a teacher. The third, fourth and fifth graders also had to write a list of the words they used. They liked doing it over and over again because they could make a different snowman each time!

Here is how it turned out.

I'm most likely going to use this again this year. I'm glad I laminated it!

Thanks for visiting my blog... come back soon!

Making Gingerbread People

Is anyone doing the iconic gingerbread unit this year? I did last year, and I am planning on doing it again this year.

Last year the Gingerbread Man left clues all around the school for us to follow. The final clue lead us right back to our classroom, where we discovered that the Gingerbread Man had already been! He'd been too fast for us! As a consolation prize, though, he left us a plate of blank gingerbread people and some supplies to decorate them with. The kids got to decorate and eat their own gingerbread people.

I was so proud of my moment of organization... I used muffin tins to organize all of the decorations for the students. The kids usually do their work in groups, so instead of having to buy supplies for each group (three containers of sprinkles, etc) I could easily just divide all of my supplies into multiple muffin tins.

This is so Martha Stewart, isn't it?

Here are two of my little dudes working on their gingerbread people.

Here is an example of one of their final products. In hindsight, I think this year I will look for larger cookie cutters... these were so small, they didn't have much room to decorate, and the gingerbread people looked more like gingerbread monsters!

I will keep you posted on what we end up doing this year. What do you do for your Gingerbread unit?