Winter Wonderland

We are bringing in the new year learning all about Winter!  We have been teaching the kids all about Snowmen, Igloos, Winter Animals, Hibernation and Winter clothes.  Living in Alabama, snow is not the most common sight but the kids lucked up this week with a rare winter snow day.  It did not last long but it was fun while it was here!  They were so excited to come to school the next day and tell me all about what they got to do in the snow.  

We are still learning all about Winter but I wanted to share what we have done so far.

As always, we love creating new doors for the month.  Plus, we love having a different door that no one else does!  This year, we decided to have the kids make a cup of hot chocolate.  We cut out mug shapes and they tore brown construction paper into small pieces and then added the paper and real marshmallows to a ziploc bag.  We taped them on the back of the mugs and added them to the door.  We used the saying: "Warming Our Hearts With Jesus."

Penguins on Ice: The kids painted bubble wrap white and pressed it on blue paper.  Then we glued aluminum foil for a piece of ice and added their handprint penguins.

The kids had a blast making their snow globes!  We traced the outline of the plate on the paper and gave them the snowman and snowflake stickers.  They glued cotton on the bottom of the circle and added their stickers to the scene.  Then, they glued their black base on the paper.  I hot glued the clear plates on top and added clear glitter and snowflake confetti so they could shake it up like a true snow globe.

Doily Snowman:  The kids glued two different shaped doilies to form a snowman.  Using popsicle sticks, the added the arms and using thumbprints, they made the eyes and mouth.  They finished it off with a carrot nose, pom poms for buttons and a bow for a girl and a hat for a boy.

It's Winter (but not really in Alabama!)

It's winter time! Well, like my title says, not really where we live in Alabama but at least it is in the Alligator room! The craziness of living in the South - 60-70 degree Winter days! We spend January in our class learning about Winter, Seasonal Clothing, Snowman, Penguins, Bears & Hibernation and Emotions & Manners. I am bringing you three different crafts we have done in this post!

I decided it would be fun to practice spelling our names and recognizing the letters by building a snowman with our names. My aide and I each sat with a child and let them tell us the letters to spell their names. Our kids are all 3 now so we are working very hard on this!

Seasonal Clothing is not always the easiest craft idea. So I thought it would be more fun to paint plates skin color and then add eyes, construction paper hair and ear muffs. For fun, they stamped a snowflake and sprinkled iridescent glitter onto a tongue like they were catching snowflakes!

The kids loved this craft as they got to eat a sweet treat once they were finished. I created a dotted line snowman on my computer and then we cut them out and glued them on light blue paper. We helped outline the circles with glue and the kids got a container of marshmallows to create their snowman and trace along the dotted lines. Of course, once done, they got to eat their leftover marshmallows.