Capturing Children's Interest in Winter and Snow

Children are naturally curious about the world around them. I've noticed that winter and snow are of particular interest to little ones. There are many experiences that can be incorporated into the various classroom centers around snow and winter. Classroom centers can be used to integrate multiple real-life contexts in order to capture children's interests and imaginations and encourage them to engage in cooperative play and exploration.

Consider:

· providing students with squeeze spray bottles of coloured water to use outdoors on a snowy day in order to colour, colour mix, and create designs in the snow

· placing shredded white paper in a large tactile tub (or empty water table) along with plastic trees, rocks, twigs, and various forest animals and encouraging children to dramatize a wintry forest habitat

· placing various combinations of ice cubes coloured as the primary colours (e.g., one blue and one yellow; one blue and one red; one yellow and one red) in separate bowls at the science area and encourage students to make predictions and then observations about what will happen the ice cubes melt

· pictures of winter activities (e.g., skiing, skating, sledding), summer activities (e.g., swimming, skipping rope, jogging), and general anytime activities (e.g., driving a car, eating breakfast) can be placed at the math table and students can be encouraged to sort the pictures into a Venn chart with the headings ‘winter’, ‘summer’, and ‘both’

· incorporating various sizes and shapes of ice (frozen using a variety of containers and molds) and snow from outside into the water table so students can explore, experiment, and create with these materials

· placing a large quantity of outdoor snow in large bins at the science table so students can explore it using large magnifying glasses and observe and record in a communal journal their observations and emerging understandings as it changes state from solid, to liquid, to gas