I is for Ice and Icicles W is for Winter

Sorry for the delay in blogging today!  I have had a busy day.  I had the wonderful opportunity to sub for second grade this afternoon.  Then this evening at the high school, I ran the clock for the wrestling meet.  Between that I took my daughter to piano practice.  These opportunities allow me to see the wonderful learning opportunities that are occurring all over our school district.

Today our read aloud story was Snowballs by Lois Ehlert.   Lois Ehlert is a master of collage and Snowballs is a delightful look at a variety of snow people and animals that can be made with snowballs and household items like mittens, buttons, and nuts. Snowballs is told in the words of a child who, along with the rest of the family, has "been waiting for a really big snow, saving good stuff in a sack." The good stuff includes corn, bird seed, and nuts for the birds and squirrels to eat off of the snow creatures; hats, scarves, bottle caps, plastic forks, buttons, fall leaves, a man's tie, and a lot of other things. The photo collages feature fabric circles as snowballs that are transformed when stacked and decked out with features and accessories.
 
Today at my center the children read the story Snowflakes Falling.  We learned that I can be a letter as well as a word.  On each page the children read the sentence, and identified how many snowflakes they needed to stamp to have the correlating number.

At one of our independent centers the children cut out, wrote their name on the back of, and colored a hot coco mug.  Tomorrow they will be given the opportunity to taste test hot cocoa.  On Monday during play time they will add marshmallows to their cocoa by dipping the end of a pencil in white paint and stamping it on their mug.  I was very impressed with the children's ability to follow directions independently at this center.  As you can see they also did a great job of coloring.