Now imagine Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye signing, SNOW with their lovely leading actresses in White Christmas and you have the motivation for my last Coop, We learned all about Winter the Season and Snow. Of course because it is a prek coop we are working on the building blocks of good learning and strong handwriting and reading skills so most of our activities revolve around that, but we do love science it can't help but creep in. We had oodles of fun, from making our own snowman snacks to changing mat man into a snowman and coming up with our song to do it. We had 5 different kinds of snowflakes, we started with real snow since we were lucky enough to have some of that in the back yard, I had gotten a magnifying glass from my favorite teaching store that magnifies 10 x's over, so we used that to look at the snowflakes in all their glory. It reminded me of Teton Science School and when it dawned on me that there were people out there that for a living studied snow, the flakes do intrigue me, even if the ole saying no two snowflakes are alike is only partially true, I didn't go that in depth with the kiddos. But we did start with a particle of dust and then work through the process of a developing snowflake, one of the kiddos in coop that calls me Ramanda says when I have finished my little lecture on snowflake making, "oh how beautiful it must be to be a snowflake and grow like that" LOL well Maybe I am not the only one in LOVE with snow.
This is one of the indoor snows we made, cornstarch and shaving cream with hidden treasures, After working through the scientific method with real cold snow the kids were all too thrilled to play with warm snow even if it was fake. Jim went from I don't want to do this to throwing the snow in the air and all over, yep that was a messy snow that does not melt away in case you were wondering. While I was working on clean up and the next project the kiddos made snowballs out of paper from my recycling bin the crumpling is great for pre-writing strengthening and paper and ping pong balls make awesome indoor snowballs
Here you can see two of the different snows, Addy never did really dive into her fake snow not this one anyways, I found some grow your own snow at the dollar store we tried out, so we could compare different textures and for the coolness of the expansion in water, it gets them every time add water and poof! Addy loved the silicone feeling snow, James not so much, the other kids were just having a ball with all of it.
After cutting snowflakes out of coffee filters and using our scissor skills we tried our hands at crystallizing this was the one I LOVED the kids thought it was neat but it takes time which is always a risk with kiddos this age as to whether they will stick with it or not, so this is the before and after but not of the same snow flake, We made snowflakes out of pipe cleaners and then the kids at to go home and add water to their magic solution and let the snowflake crystallize over night, I had made one the night before so they would get the idea, which is the one below, so interesting to me!
After that we finished up with a good ole fashion snowball fight inside, the kids loved it and we had a snowball fight everyday the rest of the week until the snowballs somehow melted, or disappeared, Hard to say which :) For this coop we teach every week for a Month solid, the next week we had a field trip to see Going on a Bear Hunt, it was way cute, just like the kiddos in our coop, so fun to work with I love all the fun things we get to do with our kids and it is a bonus to have their peers here to support it. Can you tell I am weighing the pros and cons of coop, preschool registration is next week in our area, for next year, which one doesn't have to register right away unless one is picky like I am... Stress, a little bit of STRESS
