A polar animal theme is always fun in the winter months! I'm sharing my favorite polar animal activities and centers for Preschool, Pre-k, and Kindergarten (and a fun freebie too!) If you want all the Polar Animal Math and Literacy Centers click HERE.
Grab our free winter preschool prewriting printables and invite students to practice and improve their pre-writing skills. | prewriting |
❄️ Learning is fun with 100+ Winter Theme ideas and printables for January math, snowflake crafts, winter activities, snow science for kids.
Try all of these winter science experiments this season! Even if there is no snow in sight you can still do winter science activities!
These January preschool themes are a perfect way to study winter with 3- and 4-year olds, using fun and inviting hands-on activities!
These preschool activities on winter are full of ice fishing, ice skating, snowmen, and snow much fun! Check out these winter literacy activities!
A simple milk science project even Frosty the Snowman will love. Explore winter chemistry with fun color changing milk experiment.
Free Pre-k lesson plans and ideas. All winter lesson plans. Includes tons of preschool winter activities.
Make a snow fort indoors with this winter STEM activity for kids. Use a few materials, your imagination and lots of hands-on exploration!
An easy to set up snow writing tray for practicing emerging writing skills. Perfect for a preschool Arctic animal theme or a winter activity.
Try all of these winter science experiments this season! Even if there is no snow in sight you can still do winter science activities!
We have been celebrating winter, snow and ice. Our activities included much art and some loose parts activities. Our sensory bins were a hit as well. We also brought snow in to paint with l
Winter bulletin board ideas that are great for building classroom community and a sense of inclusion among kids.
The magic milk experiment has always been a hit with the kids. It’s so fun to watch all the colors “run away” from the soap and make cool patterns.
We have been celebrating winter, snow and ice. Our activities included much art and some loose parts activities. Our sensory bins were a hit as well. We also brought snow in to paint with l
Explore nine creative winter classroom activities to use in the classroom to keep students engaged and learning during the chilly season!
These winter block play ideas will transform your block center into a wintery, Arctic world, and spark the kids’ imaginations. Sometimes you just need to change up your Block Center for something new
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We fill sectioned tray with odds and ends. Check out what the kids do with it! Hours of entertainment here!
While we do associate winter with Christmas and New Years, for teachers who don't have time to change their bulletin board displays multiple times during the season, a simple winter-themed display works well because of it's versatility and "built in" festivity! This kindergarten teacher decided to combine her seasonal wall display with her lesson on mitten patterning and the results are fantastic! Mitten Crafts To duplicate the original craft, create a card stock mitten template for students to trace onto craft paper. Armed with washable markers in assorted colors, have your students practice making their own patterns and designs on the mittens. This might also be a great time to throw in a lesson on color theory (e.g. complimentary colors, primary v. secondary colors, etc.). You might also consider... Providing students with card stock mitten cut outs, paper punches, and festive yarn for a pre-decorating lacing activity. Creating "hand print" mittens by covering the child's hand with craft paint, making a print onto card stock, then using the print as a guide to draw a mitten. Add glitter to the wet paint and provide other craft supplies for students to use in decorating the final mitten shape. Providing students with card stock mitten cut outs, small pieces of colored art tissue paper, and school glue, inviting them to make colorful (patterned!) mitten collages. Mitten Tree Winter Wall Display Background: The original display did not have a specific background color, but you might consider creating a snowy landscape with light blue and white bulletin board paper or using a complimentary (festive!) color like red or green to frame the cutouts. Title: "Our Mitten Tree" or a cute saying like "Our mittens warm our hands, but family and friends warm our hearts!" Border: The original display did not have a border, but you might consider a winter-themed trimmer or solid border in a complimentary color. Decoration: 1) The Tree. Create a tree from a brown paper roll (background paper or craft paper). This can be done free-hand or you might be able to find an image online that can be "blown up" with a projector and traced. Pull cotton balls apart and glue them to the branches and add other detailing to the tree with markers (i.e. bark, knots, holes in the tree, etc.). 2) The Mittens. Hang your students' crafts on the tree! This wall display is simple, festive, and will last through the entire winter! What are your favorite winter decoration ideas? Let us know in the comment section below!
When it's time to come back from winter break or Christmas break - it's time to hit the ground running in kindergarten. There is explosive growth that happens from now until the spring in both reading and math.
Engaging winter lesson plans for preschool and toddlers. Get ready-made lesson plans, activities, and ideas for this great preschool theme!
Laura @inspiremyplay Founder of @inspiremyplay, Early Years teacher for 11 years and mummy to three gorgeous girls. I'm passionate about about the benefits of play in early childhood. This post may contain affiliate links. This means that if you click on a link and go on to make a purchase, I may receive a small commission (at no additional cost to you). Please read my disclosure policy for more details. Are you searching for fun and engaging winter-themed sensory and creative play ideas for your little ones? Look no further! This blog post is filled with easy and interactive activities that are perfect for preschoolers and young children at home or in an early years setting. From exploring winter through touch, sound, and sight, to incorporating winter themes into sensory play, these activities provide opportunities for play-based learning with the aim to support your child’s development. Get ready to have some winter fun with your little ones with these amazing sensory and creative play ideas. Frozen Bubbles This is such a magical experience to do with little ones! If you get a cold morning then it is well worth bracing the weather to blow bubbles and watch them freeze together! This works well when it’s about -2, -3C so as we have cold snap this week why not save this activity to try! Check out our blog post to find out how to do it. Frozen Pom-Poms There really is something magic about freezing things for kids to break free again! Add droppers, warm water, containers & scoops. This is great for fine motor skills and also provides opportunities for colour sorting, maths, exploring freezing and melting and lots more! Please supervise carefully. Pom-poms are a potential choking hazard to small children. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Inspire My Play ® (@inspiremyplay) Snowflake Bubble Foam Bubble foam is always an easy win for us! On this occasion we added some snowflake cookie cutters and my little one loved exploring making and popping the bubbles! To make bubble foam simply mix roughly half a cup of bubble bath and 1 cup of water together in a blender or using a hand mixer. Spoon out the foam into a tray. If there’s any watery liquid left in the bottom give that a whisk too. I also some added scoops and bowls and sequin snowflakes that she enjoyed searching for in the foam! Once the foam disappears you can easily re-whisk it back into a foam. In fact, we actually left this in the tray for a few days then re-whisked it to use today and it was just as good as before! Winter Chickpea Sensory Bin It’s no secret that dried chickpeas are one of our favourite sensory play materials! They are so satisfying to scoop and pour (for grown-ups too!) and are a bit easier to contain than rice and other grains. They also last forever to re-use over and over. You don’t have to colour them, but it makes a fun change and it’s so easy to do! To colour dried chickpeas all you need is a bag or jar, a squirt of ready-mix tempera paint and a lined tray to lay them on to dry. You can find our step by step guide here. The chickpeas dry super quick, but if you’re in a hurry you can put them in the oven on a low heat to dry out for 5 minutes. These winter style ones will be perfect for all our seasonal play. Throw in some bowls and scoops and a poppet is great fun to fill with chickpeas too! You can buy our nesting bowl set here. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Inspire My Play ® (@inspiremyplay) Arctic Small World Thanks to @minimundos_demimundo on Instagram for sharing this polar inspired small world in the PlayTRAY. There’s so much to explore with this one! Save this list of bases to try sometime : Water with blue food colouring Salt Dyed blue salt, Shaving foam, Oobleck (water & cornflour) Baking soda+water (add vinegar for a fizzy reaction!) Ice Art Freezing some water in a shallow tray makes a great canvas for some process art. You can paint on the ice with regular paint, paint sticks, watercolours or dilute some food colouring and drip the colour on using droppers. Each will achieve a slightly different effect. This is a brilliant one for encouraging kids to explore and experiment and a great opportunity for some colour mixing theory too. Iceberg Sensory Bin I realise this small world isn’t geographically accurate but when your 2 year-old insists we need polar bears what can you do? I wanted to share this particular set-up to show tray play doesn’t always have to be messy! My girls had just as much fun making up little stories with this set up. To make the sea we used a batch of dyed dry pasta I used food colouring for this batch but you can find more info and alternative options on a blog post I wrote here. The iceberg is a bit of packaging painted white and I used a bit of felt for the snow. The mountains are triangles of plywood with the tops painted with acrylic paint. Ice Castles Fill containers of different shapes and sizes with water and leave outside on a cold night to freeze. Use the ice like building blocks to create a castle, using shaving foam as cement! To decorate the castles we used droppers to squeeze coloured water over it and also used paintbrushes to paint the ice. This is a messy activity but incredibly fun! If you can, wrap up warm and do it outside. Also, having a bowl of water to clean hands is also handy. Shaving Foam Arctic Small World Whenever the freezer needs clearing of frost I can’t help but want to set up a small world with it! A quick squirt of shaving foam in the bottom of our playTRAY with a tiny bit of blue food colouring swirled in made the sea and then the frost/ice was laid on top. It inevitably gets a bit messy, but actually shaving foam is pretty easy to clean up. A bowl of water nearby to wash hands is useful and children often enjoy the opportunity to do some washing up! The mountains are a quick DIY using plywood and acrylic paint. The majority of our animal figures are from Schleich, which I highly recommend. Shop Schleich Animals (Amazon US) Shop Schleich Animals (Amazon UK) Cotton-Wool Snow For a low mess, easy option for pretend snow try cotton-wool balls! These are really fun to set up with construction vehicles. My littlest loved loading them up and moving them around the tray and clearing the road of snow. Card Puzzles Don’t throw your Christmas cards away just yet! Why not recycle them into some DIY puzzles? Make these as simple or challenging as you like to suit your own child. Or increase the challenge gradually by cutting the pieces in half each time they complete it. Obviously this isn’t just limited to Christmas cards but is a great way of reusing them! The benefits of puzzles are numerous... problem solving, reasoning about shapes, fine motor skills and concentration to make a few. And best of all this activity takes minutes to set up and is totally free. Winter Farm My kids love a small world farm and so I thought I’d make them a wintery version in the PlayTRAY! I also wanted to show you a few quick ways to make fake snow but you could just choose one and use it for the entire tray. Icing sugar and desiccated coconut are super easy ways to make pretend snow. Mixing equal parts shaving foam and baking soda (bicarbonate of soda) is another way we love. You can also switch the shaving foam for white hair conditioner and that works well too (and smells lovely!). We made our frozen elements by sticking the PlayTRAY segments in the freezer. The frozen mud can be made using chocolate pudding mix or by mixing 1 cup of flour, 1/4 cup of cocoa and and 1 cup of water, before putting into the freezer for a few hours. This slowly thawed throughout the day to make a fun, messy place to play! Shop Schleich Farm Animals (Amazon US) Shop Schleich Farm Animals (Amazon UK) Ice Skating Penguins To make skating penguins, fill a muffin tray with water and cover with tinfoil. Snap some craft sticks in half and carefully push them through the tinfoil so they are standing upright in the water. Place in the freezer overnight. In the meantime print and cut out the penguins. If you have a laminator, laminating them will give them better protection from the water. Once the water is frozen, remove the tinfoil and tape the penguins to the sticks. Remove them for the muffin tin and you are ready to play! They will glide easily over the glossy surface of the PlayTRAY lid These dancing penguins are available to download for free on our printables page here. An alternative method would be to freeze animal figures directly in the ice. Winter Woodland Play Dough One of mine & the girls favourite play dough invitations! I made this white play dough using our usual recipe and a generous amount of white icing colouring. Alongside the play dough, I put out some natural loose parts and some little trees. As well as making small worlds this is a lovely one for exploring patterns with the loose parts and making tracks in the play dough with the animals (swipe through to see pics) If you would like more info on our top small world resources check out our blog post about it. Making play dough is one of the activities in our FREE Beginners’ Guide to Sensory Play. You can download it by clicking the button below: Get your FREE ebook For more simple DIY recipes & ideas for sensory play at home download your Beginner's Guide to Sensory Play by subscribing to Inspire My Play today. Get Yours Now DIY Snow We have tried a lot of different ways of making artificial snow and this is by far our favourite! It’s so simple to make combining roughly equal amounts of bicarbonate of soda (baking soda) and shaving foam. It has a great texture and is cool to touch initially, just like snow! If your snow loses it’s ability to form snowballs over time you can revive it by adding a squirt more shaving foam. To fill the PlayTRAY base I used 4 cups of bicarbonate of soda and roughly 4 cups of shaving foam. In the U.K. it is pretty hard to get large bags of bicarbonate of soda in the supermarket but you can pick up KG bags of the stuff cheaply on Amazon (it’s also great for fizzy experiments so worth having a stash in the cupboard). Northern Lights A little twist on the classic nebula jar, we made some Northern Lights jars and it was so much fun! To make the forest scene I cut a piece of adhesive vinyl. If you don’t have vinyl, some black paper will do or you could even paint a forest on the jar using an acrylic paint pen. What you need: • A jar or bottle • Water • Ready mix paint • Cotton wool balls • Bio-glitter • Black paper or vinyl Method 1. Fill your jar about a quarter to a third full of water. 2. Add a generous squirt of paint and some bio glitter and mix. 3. Pull apart or unroll cotton wool balls and place them in the jar. 4. Use a paint brush or similar to press them down into the paint mixture. Keep adding more cotton wool until most of the paint has been absorbed. 5. Now add more water, choose a contrasting colour paint and repeat the process. Continue until you reach the top of the jar before replacing the lid. 6. Cut out a forest silhouette from black vinyl or paper and stick around the bottom of your jar. And that’s it! All mine were able to do this (just help with the forest scene) and each one was unique 🥰. They really are mesmerising to look at! Snow Subtraction Cloud Pom Pom Push I made this one as a visual way to explore subtraction with one of my little ones. The idea was to lay out the pom-poms on the holes and then push through the amount she was subtracting before counting how many were left. I made the cloud into a mini whiteboard with a piece of contact paper/ sticky back plastic over the top and then she was able to record her answer using a chalk pen before wiping it off. For those not ready for subtraction this is still just fun to use as a pom-pom push-it’s a great activity for strengthening little fingers (and they certainly needed it at first with some of these holes!). You could also use this for counting backwards or 1:1 correspondence-say the next number each time you push one through the hole. Winter Light Panel Play Do you own a light panel? This has been a fantastic addition to our play room For this activity I set out a collection of translucent loose parts to make snowflakes. Winter Sensory Bag This winter sensory bag is great for practising a bit of letter formation. Using a sensory approach like this should help children internalise how to form the letter more quickly as well as being more fun and appealing than pen and paper! To make the sensory bag I used hair straighteners to seal three sides of a laminating pouch, added some hair gel, food colouring and some snowflake sequins. I then sealed the final side of the laminating pouch. If you don’t have a laminating pouch or hair straighteners you can easily use a ziplock bag instead. We used ours on a light panel which worked really well but any surface with a contrasting colour would do. Frozen Penguin Eggs Children love to rescue anything frozen! One of the great positives about this activity as it takes the children a long time to do! Here's how to prepare them: 1. Blow up some balloons and let the air out again to stretch them. 2. Place your penguins inside the balloons. This can be a bit tricky but with a bit of patience you can actually get quite large animals inside. 3. Place the balloon over a tap and fill with water. 4. Tie the balloon up and place it in the freezer. Once they are frozen snip off the top of your balloon and it should be easy to peel off. I made a bit of oobleck to put in the bottom of our tray (2 cups of cornflour, 2 cups of water and a drop of food colouring). It’s not necessary but added another sensory element to it and the girls enjoyed playing with the penguins in it afterwards. I gave them spray bottles full with warm water and a little toy hammer to prize open their eggs. The beauty of this is definitely how long it takes- we got a good hours play out of this 😁 Fork Painted Polar Bears Painting with something other than a paintbrush is good fun and fork printing makes great-looking fur! We first made these last year and the girls loved it so much! Feed the Penguin Phonics This DIY game is perfect for practicing letter sounds and words! In this game, I hid the fish with letter sounds written on in a tray of cloud dough- it could easily be rice or anything else- this is just what I already had available to use. This idea was to search through the cloud dough to find the correct sound and then feed it to the penguin. You could easily switch this for words or for little ones posting poms-poms is also lots of fun! To catch the letters as they were fed to the penguin I attached a cardboard box to the back. I also made a hole for his tummy so they could see the contents! This penguin cut out and the fish are available to download here. Bead & Button Snowflakes This is such a calming & mindful process, plus the results are so beautiful! These look lovely hung up on a tree or in a window. All you need are some pipe cleaners to form the snowflake shape and a selection of buttons or beads to thread on. It’s such a great work out for little hands! 🖐 Frozen Play Dough and Wooden People I painted these little Elsa & Anna pegs for the girls to use in their play. I’m definitely not a peg painting expert but it wasn’t that hard to get something resembling the characters by using the right colours! And I think these would make a gorgeous DIY gift. You can check out the blog post here for the full details. Penguin Rescue Place little penguins (or other objects) into a tray or cake tin with water and a bit of food colouring and pop them into the freezer. Once frozen use warm water and a dropper, a spray bottle (because this is always a hit!) to help melt the ice. You can also use a spoon for chipping away at the ice and some tweezers for removing the penguins. I’ve found over the years that this type of activity is usually a winner. It can always be re-frozen and taken out again. Secret Ice Painting Have you tried this before? A little bit of table salt brushed around a cookie cutter or stencil creates a hidden picture on ice, ready to be discovered! We used watered down ready mix paint to reveal the hearts in the ice. You could switch this up for all sorts of themes! You need to be ready to do this activity straight away after prepping before the salt dissolves the ice too much. Either pop a tray of water in the freezer or leave it outside on a cold night to freeze over. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Inspire My Play ® (@inspiremyplay) Arctic Small World Backdrop Try an arctic backdrop for enhancing your small world set ups. We made this particular scene using a cardboard box. To make the icebergs, cut out circles of cardboard that get increasingly smaller. Glue them together and invite the kids to paint them white. You can download our arctic backdrop printable here.
I love the holidays, but I am EXHAUSTED! I’m so over traveling, partying and never ending holiday to do lists and ready to get back into a bit of a routine around here. We had lots of snowy fun this week that I can’t wait to share with you! Here were our plans […]
A simple milk science project even Frosty the Snowman will love. Explore winter chemistry with fun color changing milk experiment.
Coming back after winter break is hard for both teachers and students. Everyone has gotten used to sleeping in and not following a set schedule. It's cold outside and no one wants to get out of their warm beds in the morning and face the elements to get to school. One thing that helps ease back into the routine of school days (aside from lots of practice and refreshers on classroom procedures!) is to keep lessons fresh and exciting. My kids love doing escape rooms, and I love seeing them learn while having fun. A few weeks ago I had some of the clue envelopes stacked on my desk in preparation for a Christmas Around the World escape room; one of my students saw it and got super excited, then told the rest of the class we were "doing another one of those things". For the next couple of days, I had a few kids ask me multiple times a day if it was time to do the escape room. I've never had so many kids excited for a lesson as when I use the escape room format. Thankfully, I have several escape rooms all ready to go to get us through the rest of the winter. First, there's Escape the Arctic Tundra, which focuses on syllables. While practicing with syllables, students also learn the names of various Arctic animals. (Get it here in my shop or here in my TPT store!) Why should learning about holidays of other cultures stop with Christmas Around the World activities? Whether or not you and your community celebrate Chinese New Year, I always think it is wonderful for children to learn about special days that others celebrate. The skill focus for this escape room is comparing numbers, but students will also get to learn about symbols and customs of this holiday. (Find it here in my shop or here in my TPT store.) Groundhog Day is always a fun day with young kids; the excitement of predicting, the reassurance that winter really won't last forever. It also makes a great time to talk about opposites, which is the focus of this Groundhog-Day themed escape room. (Grab it here in my shop or here in my TPT store.) The 100th Day of School! A milestone worth celebrating. This escape room focuses on numbers to 100 (of course) with hundreds charts, ten-frames, and base-10 formats. (Get it here in my shop or here in my TPT store.) Valentine's Day has always been a personal favorite of mine--mostly because it's also my birthday. As a kid, it was the perfect birthday. It wasn't a big enough holiday, like Christmas, to overshadow my birthday, but we always got to have a party day at school. This escape room gives students the chance to practice matching upper and lower case letters with puzzles, "I Have, Who Has?", write the room, and a cut and paste activity. (Find it here in my shop or here in my TPT store.) Presidents Day may be a minor one as far as holidays go, but it is important in the knowledge of history it bestows upon our students. The skill focus for this escape room is positional words, learned in the context of important American monuments. (Snag it here in my shop or here in my TPT store.) Hopefully fun activities like these will make the winter fly by for you and your class, so you can get to spring break and warmer weather! Happy Teaching!
We watched Happy Feet over the weekend so naturally Madelynn is a bit in love with penguins lately which made it the perfect time for our penguin tot school theme. We did a few of the same penguin activities that we tried last year, but tried lots of new ones too! Here were our […]
This salt and ice experiment encourages kids to do some critical thinking. A fun penguin themed STEM activity for kids using salt and water to melt ice. Playing with ice is such a fun way to engage in science fun with kids. Ice forms when a water freezes
Looking for a fun way to boost hand strength in kids? Try our free printable snowflake activity! With simple materials and engaging tasks, this winter craft promises hours of skill-building fun.
Beautiful winter process art for preschoolers and toddlers | winter art for preschoolers | winter painting ideas for kids | epsom salt paintings
January can be a pretty blah month if we let it! The cold weather, dreary days and indoor recess can be some big downers! We try to stay ahead of that in our classroom by staying busy with a lot of fun winter activities! By filling my lesson plan book with many winter read alouds, activities and crafts, my Kinders and I are too busy to think about the cold weather! Staying busy keeps them focused and on task as well. I have found that on inside recess days, excess down time results in a lot of chaos and I lose their attention. Students perform better in our classroom (especially during these long winter days) when they know the tasks they need to complete and they have plenty of choices of activities to keep them moving, engaged and learning! Winter in Kindergarten Students love to learn about new seasons, and most importantly, all of the fun activities in each season! Winter is no exception ~ they have many stories of sledding, snow angels and snowman creating to share! This gets students excited to talk about our new season. I try to make sure that I incorporate winter themed activities in whole group, small group and center activities and always allow time for students to talk about their own experiences and make connections to what we are learning. Some of the activities that you will read about below are: Winter Sight Word Activities Winter Read Alouds & Crafts Winter Write the Room Winter Writing Winter Center Activities Getting Started We use the "Let's Talk" picture to get students talking, thinking about and making connections about activities they like to do in the winter. The "Let's Talk" resource is part of my Winter Activities: Sight Word Book in my TpT Store. You can download it there if you would like to use it in your classroom! Students love adding their ideas to our class list that becomes an anchor chart in our room. They use this list for future writing activities. I love the School Smart Chart Tablets (link below) for making class lists! We use this chart paper weekly to make anchor charts that hand around our room. Students reference these charts for other activities throughout the week! Winter Sight Word Books Using the emergent reader book below helps students practice their sight words as well as spark conversations about the winter season. We introduce this in a whole group lesson, review it in a small group and students practice on their own independently. After reading it in class for a week, students take this book home and add it to their reading treasure box. Winter Read Alouds Throughout the month of January, we have many whole group read aloud lessons centered around the new season. Below are some of our favorite winter stories and activities to go along with them. One of my all time favorites is Sadie and the Snowman, written by Allen Morgan and illustrated by Brenda Clark. This story tells of a young girl who creates a snowman that later melts. While she is at first sad to find out that her snowman is melting, she finds happiness in knowing that she can make another snowman. She uses different materials to create each snowman and the same animals repeatedly eat parts of her snowman. I often stop throughout the story and check for listening by asking the students if they remember the items used for each snowman and who eats each part of the snowman. At the end of the story, we work together to create a mini book about the story. It's nothing fancy, and all you need is a plain piece of white paper! These are really some of my favorite types of books! Little prep and so much application by the students. It really helps the students with awareness and recall of the text, as well as sequencing. In the picture below, you can see what students created for this story. After reading Sadie and the Snowman and making our mini book, we complete this creative writing activity. Students always have so many great ideas of why their snowman would melt. This is one of my favorites! I guess your snowman would melt if you put hot lava on it! :) We use shaving cream and white paint to make the melted snow pile and then add the construction paper peices (arms, nose, mouth and nose) after that dries. Snow Friends, written by M. Christina Butler and illustrated by Tina Macnaughton, is a wonderful story about friendship and teamwork. After reading the story of the animal friends creating their snowman, my students make fingerprint snowmen, and we hang these in our classroom. SHOP NOW for Snow Friends All You Need for a Snowman written by Alice Shertle and illustrated by Barbara Lavallee is a book that describes all of the things that you need to build a snowman accompanied by beautiful illustrations. There is a lot of fine motor skills at work while we trim up square pieces of construction paper, turning them into circles to create this snowman that decorates our classroom. Over the years, I have used various measurements to create snowmen of all different sizes. Sometimes we make large ones like shown below and other years, we have made them much smaller. Either way, they are fun to look at hanging in our classroom! SHOP NOW for All You Need for a Snowman Winter Write the Room Write the Room is an all time favorite year round (for both the Kinders and me!). It keeps the students up and moving around and they are able to talk with their peers about the words they are finding. I like to alternate between language arts and math write the room. In January, we are working heavily on sight words, so one of our write the room activities includes sight words and the other one is a review of counting and one to one correspondence with numbers 1 - 10. Write the Room(Kindergarten Sight Words) can be Downloaded in my TpT store! Download Write the Room (Numbers 1 - 10) for FREE! Winter Center Activities As mentioned above, in a whole group activity, we read All You Need for a Snowman. One of our follow up activities for this lesson is to label our classroom snowman. Later in the week, students draw their own snowman and use the chart for a model to label their snowman. Winter Memory A simple and traditional game for practicing sight words that we use often in our classroom is sight word memory. The below sight word game has a winter theme and students love to talk about the pictures they have on their sight word matches as they are playing and searching for matches. DOWNLOAD Winter Sight Memory Game Winter Writing Students use the information that we have been talking about during group lessons to create some winter sentences of their own! I am always impressed with their writing skills once we get to January! The TpT resource below contains 13 writing worksheets for students. Students use the idea chart we created earlier in the week as well as their sight words to put sentences together! DOWNLOAD this Kindergarten Writing Resource! Winter Read and Color Read and color worksheets are great 5-10 minute activities that I include during the days when we have free time here and there. I have the sentences in a pocket chart that we practice reading, and then students use the tracking dots to read on their own and color the pictures. They love to find the matching sentence in the pocket chart! DOWNLOAD 9 winter read and color worksheets in my TpT Store. Winter Family Project There are so many fun snow activities happening in the classroom, we want to be sure to make a home school connection. Every month, we have a family homework project, and in January families make snow creations at home. When these are returned to school, we practice our superstar speaking and listening skills and students share their creations with the class! They LOVE to share their family projects! It is a great opportunity to work on speaking and listening skills as well! Download January Family Project parent letter and template for FREE! Happy Teaching this winter in your classroom! Stay Warm! SHOP ADDITIONAL SNOWMAN BOOKS:
Books “Bears in the Snow” by Shirley Parenteau “Sneezy the Snowman” by Maureen Wright Five Little Snowmen Five little snowmen standing in a row (hold up 5 fingers) Each wit…
Here’s a fun collection of winter themed learning activities for preschoolers! Work on counting, literacy, and fine motor skills. Explore some science concepts too! I have some links throughout the post with supplies that we used, and then check the bottom of the post for the supply links all in one place. This post contains […]
Looking for some fun winter themed graphing activities to do as a class? Here are three ideas that you might consider including in your lesson plans! Do You Like Hot Chocolate? Winter and hot cocoa just go together! While most of your kiddos have probably tried the warm, chocolatey drink at one time or another, have a tasting party - complete with marshmallows or whipped cream and chocolate shavings - and take a poll! Extensions... Pit homemade hot chocolate against store-bought mixes. Try different flavors of hot chocolate and vote on your favorite. Land O Lakes makes a great assortment of flavors - french vanilla, raspberry, mint, warm oatmeal cookie, etc. - and offers them in convenient indiviual servings! Which Version Do You Like Best? Winter just isn't complete without a reading of the classic children's tale, "The Mitten". This year, consider incorporating three different versions of the story into your reading plans and take a poll to see which one your students liked best! We chose versions written by Jim Aylesworth, Jan Brett, and Alvin Tresselt. My Favorite Winter Activity While this option isn't as hands on as the previous two graphing activities, it still offers an opportunity for building graphing skills and discussing how winter weather brings with it a whole new set of activities to enjoy! As an extension, you might consider having your students not only vote for their favorite winter activity, but also write about why it's their favorite or, perhaps, recall and write about a time when they participated in the activity.
You've got your classroom theme, but you may be thinking about how you can decorate your classroom for upcoming seasons on a budget. I'm here to help!
These printables are great for incorporating into a themed day or week about snow and snowflakes. They utilize the subject of snow for a variety of fun and educational activities. Here are six diffe
Find over 150 winter books for preschool and kindergarten in this helpful post!
These adorable FREE activities to go along with The Mitten will be emailed to you within minutes! We love using this story throughout the month of January, and even more activities are included in my unit shown below.
Fun and easy handprint winter tree! Talk about how trees change throughout the year as kids use their hands and fingers to create art.
These winter songs for kids are the perfect way to get kids singing about all things snow while moving and dancing at the same time.
Did you know that you can easily choose fun January themes to enjoy every month of the year? Check out all the fun ideas and Winter Themes Ideas here. Preschool Themes and January Holidays and Activities
Looking for winter math activities for kids that are fun & hands-on? Check out these winter theme math activities using a balance or bucket scale.
Winter Nature Scavenger Hunt - Search for the signs of winter with this fun outdoor scavenger hunt idea for kids. (printable list included)
Explore nine creative winter classroom activities to use in the classroom to keep students engaged and learning during the chilly season!
When it's SUPER cold outside, it's the perfect time to explore ice! There are so many ice activities and experiments you can do with it, too. Ice changes as you investigate it, which captivates their attention and gets them excited about science. Ice can melt, break, change color, and so much more.
