Well, this year has been a pretty sad year so far for snow here in Ontario. At Christmas time last year we were buried under feet and feet of snow, plus a few good inches of ice encasing everything and making it look like Elsa’s frozen winter wonderland.

It was treacherous, but beautiful! The most snow we’ve had fall so far this year is less than a foot and most of it hasn’t stay in contact with the ground for more than a day or so.

You may not agree with me, but I think snow is what truly makes winter bearable and beautiful! Without the beauty of sparkling rays of sun bouncing off the glimmering snow, or the brisk, cold feeling as it seeps into your boots when you stepped into a too-tall snow bank, winter is just so blah. Cold, grey, and did I mention cold? Like 20 degrees below zero Celsius cold (that’s -4 F). I can take the cold as long as there’s snow, my friend!

Since we’ve been having to do without snow, we’re knee deep instead in fun, wintry, SNOWY books. The past two weeks we’ve been focusing on doing our Five in a Row The Snowy Day and having LOTS of fun!

In the past I’ve tried to include our older boys in the unit studies more, but this book is actually from BEFORE Five in a Row, so it’s more suitable for the younger crowd. The Boy (9) and JJ (8) joined in with us on a couple activities, but mostly I focused on Miss E (2) and Keekers (5 ).

We don’t follow a traditional way of doing Five in a Row (I prefer to modify it, find my own activities and ideas, and sometimes we don’t touch on each suggested area), but we do have lots of fun.

At the end of the post you’ll find links to other fantastic FIAR posts on The Snowy Day. Enjoy!

Five in a Row {for Winter}

The Snowy Day Unit Study

Literature

The Snowy Day is a fun, simple story about a boy who wakes up and finds a lot of snow has fallen! He ventures out into it, making tracks, getting covered in snow, building a snow man and making a snow angel. There are a lot of interesting things to point out and learn from in the story, and though we added in a number of other books over the week, we focused our main reading around this book.

Homeschool Share has a lapbook for The Snowy Day – we did not complete it this time, but I may save it for when Miss E is older and able to do more of it.

We did use the story sequencing cards, so after reading the book a few times, I had Keekers put the cards in order. There are actually a lot of details to remember in this story, so we had to do it a few times (mom included! :D) before she got it right.

Keekers also did a basic Story Map of characters, setting, problem and solution, and read words / matched them to their pictures (from Homeschool Creations’ The Snowy Day pack).

There are TONS of other great winter printables and worksheets available from 3 Dinosaurs, which we’ll be using with our next winter book study as well.

Miss E isn’t really big on worksheets yet, so we tried doing dot markers on all the S’s (S for Snow!), dry erase tracing (which is really more like just scribbling, but hey, she likes it :D) matching shapes on cards to ones in the book, and mostly just coloring.

Of course, there are LOTS of really great books to go along with wintertime, so we read a few of them over the weeks (and will continue to renew them from the library because we are enjoying them so much).

Since Tom builds a snowman in the story, we practiced dressing up our bear puzzles and potato heads.

It is great fine motor skill building getting those potato head pieces into the correct holes!

Math

We estimated how long it would take for water to freeze in different size containers. As the day progressed and the hours went by, we changed our guesses.

Keekers built a tower with the largest blocks on the bottom to the smallest on top.

The boys had her permission to smash the ice blocks when we were finished – oh what destructive fun :D

Some of the leftover ice blocks made it inside for Miss E to have some fun smashing around too. A little TOO much fun maybe, judging by the look on her face :D

For the rest of our math time we used some sheets from the Tot Pack for Miss E and counting cotton balls as she transferred them from the bowl to the muffin pan.

I printed some numbers on snowflakes and buried them in the sensory bin for her to find, then count out the same number of objects to put into her cup.

Keekers played roll-a-dice (from the 3 dinosaurs snow learning math pack) to build a snowman.

She also did some addition equations using snowflakes to show the two parts.

We did work on measurements with ingredients while making homemade ice cream in our new ice cream maker, as well as our favorite Chocolate Chunk Snowball cookies.

(Melt in your mouth delicious!)

When we made gingerbread snowmen, the girls had so much fun rolling out the dough.

I let Miss E get her own piece (really just to demolish it) but the look of pure joy was worth the mess!

Hands On Fun

We definitely had the most fun with hands on activities for this study. I’ve had it in the back of my mind that we needed to make fake snow but never had enough baking soda on hand. We loaded up at the grocery store and the snow was a hit!

We learned by trial and error that the best place to play with it was on the floor on a tablecloth – WAY less messy that way!

Also, cookie cutters do not work :p But sand toy moulds would have been perfect (if we could have found them in our summer stuff). However, the kids were content to just make their own shapes, tromp their toy animals through the “snow”, build snowmen and forts, then smash it all and start over again.

I finally put together a sensory bin for Miss E to play with, and added a few new “wintry” items each time we took it out. She has more fun when someone is playing “with” her, but it still buys a few good minutes of entertainment for her.

We dragged animal feet through the rice, stacked up and knocked down piles of cotton balls, and dug for some of the items buried under the “snow”.

Science

After we grew tired of playing with the snow (and mom grew tired of cleaning up baking soda everywhere :D), we decided to make a sno-cano!

Build up a nice mound of fake snow and pour vinegar over top. The girls were thrilled with the “reaction” and had a bit of fun smushing around in the leftovers.

Little Bins for Little Hands has more Baking Soda Science ideas!

Snow observation sheet – what is snow like?

We didn’t have quite cold enough weather this week to make it snow, but you can check out our Snowflake Bentley FIAR post from last year for more on how to make it snow!

Art

Art is fast becoming one of my favorite subjects to incorporate into our lessons each week. Which is crazy weird because I am the most awkward artist ever! But with the right tutorials, instructions and materials on hand, it really is quite a blast.

We made “glittery” S shapes using pieces of foil (foil is my kind of glitter – easy clean up!) and painted snowflakes.

Watercolor and salt pictures – paint your background with water color and sprinkle salt on the wet paint before it dries (for the snow).

Once dried, paste on a piece of white construction paper for the snowy road, then cut out the shapes from the story (rectangles for houses, triangles for trees and roofs, circles for the sun) and paste on top. Paint falling snow and snow on the roof tops (if you want).

Keekers painted a snow globe – we’ve had many failed experiences with making actual homemade snow globes, so I figured a paper version would be easiest. Of COURSE Keekers decided to make Elsa’s castle in hers :D

The VERY last day of our study it snowed! Finally! We have been dying for it to come and it’s been coming down ever since.

You’d think it would be easy to walk with your toes pointed out or in – Keekers was laughing so hard trying to get her feet to do it! I guess we need to work on coordination a bit ;0)