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Preschool Fun with "The Snowy Day"

One of my favorite winter-theme books to share with preschoolers is The Snowy Day.  This year the book celebrates it's 50th anniversary and has quite a impressive history; not only is the book a Caldecott Medal winner but it was the first children's book to have an African American child as it's main character. But the story is by no means political, instead it is a sweet tale that, in my experience, all children enjoy hearing. 



One of my favorite parts in the book is when Peter makes different types of tracks in the snow so I thought it would be fun to have the boys make their own snowy-tracks pictures. 

supplies used: toy figurine, cut out of peter, blue card stock, glue,
shaving cream, craft stick, bowl, and a paint brush

mix equal parts glue and shaving cream to create puffy paint 

cover card stock in puffy paint 

use toy figurine to make foot prints  

and tracks 

place peter on top of "snow"  

big buddy's  

mini man's 

Big Buddy was most intrigued by Peter's disappearing snowball so we also did a little snow/ice melting experiment. I used a Wilson silicone mold to make snowflake ice cubes. We then took four ice cubes, covered one in salt, one in sugar, put one in mitten, and used one as a control. Big Buddy hypothesized that the ice cube covered in sugar would melt the fastest - I guessed salt :) As we watched, the salt-covered ice cube did melt the fastest but the sugar was a pretty close second. We were both surprised that the ice cube in the mitten was the last to melt.

photos of our experiment
this is a little hard to see, please click for a larger view

Lastly, I used pictures from a lap book I found at Homeschool Share as sequencing cards. 

i shuffle the cards, big buddy puts them back in the correct order, and then he uses them
to tell me the story in his own words. 

Looking for other winter kid themed activities? Be sure to check out our winter themed preschool syllabus and our homeschool page

Comments

  1. My little guy LOVES this book too! What a great idea!
    Ashley:)

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  2. This is such a cute idea. Love it.
    Thanks for visiting my blog.
    Daphne.
    http://fashiondivamommy.blogspot.com

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  3. I remember that book! I forgot all about it...I MUST find it for my kids. Thank you for the reminder! Cute and fun ideas to make it come alive, too.

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  4. What a great idea! My boys love this book. I will have to try this with them! Thanks for sharing!

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  5. I love how you added Peter in the picture. Looks like such a fun activity. I have never read this book but have been desperately trying to get it at the library for months now. It must be really good since it's always checked out. It sounds like one I should go out and buy.

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  6. I love puffy paint!!! this is such a cute activity & the melting ice experiment was fabulous! I would have thought the mitten would have melted the ice faster too bc of the heat.

    Thanks for sharing on the Sunday Showcase! I pinned this!

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  7. A lovely book and a fabulous activity. And doesn't the red figure really stand out?!

    Thank you for sharing on Kids Get Crafty!

    Maggy

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  8. I love the puffy paint. We've played with shaving cream but haven't tried mixing in glue. Brilliant idea. you could also use it to make clouds in the sky pictures too. Going to try it.

    -Veronica

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  9. Love the tracks in the snow and how The Snowy Day comes to mind as soon as you see their pictures! Great experiment too!

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  10. These turned out great! Thanks for sharing!

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  11. Great activity. Thanks for sharing. I just pinned it. I would love if you would share it on my linky party. I am looking for fun, frugal, kid-friendly activities. You can link up here

    http://funfrugalmommy.blogspot.com/2012/01/fun-frugal-friday-linky-party_26.html

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  12. Thank you for linking to Read.Explore.Learn.

    I so love what you did with this book. The toy play and craft are awesome. I pinned this post!

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  13. love this! hope we can copy some of your activities once we do this for Before FIAR. by the way, came across your blog through preschool-corner :)

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  14. Fun! I love this! Thanks for sharing and for linking up to the Afterschool Blog Hop!

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  15. Hi! I'm stopping by to let you know that I loved your craft and I featured it on my Snowy Day unit round-up! Come by to see the post here: http://maros-kindergarten.blogspot.gr/2013/01/blog-post.html I would love your feedback!

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  16. It might seem hard to keep kids engaged in learning activities when it’s a snowy day but it is just the matter of the methods you use to teach them. If you use fun activities then kids are very easy to handle inside home. You can find tons of educational activities at http://www.kidsfront.com/match-pictures.html.

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  17. I'm the Editor of Fun Family Crafts and wanted to let you know that we have featured your Snowy Day project! You can see it here:

    http://funfamilycrafts.com/melting-experiment/

    If you have other kid-friendly craft tutorials, we'd love for you to submit them. If you would like to display a featured button on your site, you can get one from the right side bar of your post above. Thanks for a great project idea!

    ReplyDelete
  18. Nice job i regularly view your blog and find it quite interesting.. keep up the good work and all the best.
    kids songs

    ReplyDelete

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