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
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.
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!
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.
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 Center Activities
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.
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!
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!
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!
Happy Teaching this winter in your classroom! Stay Warm!
SHOP ADDITIONAL SNOWMAN BOOKS:
