The Snowy Day
I introduced The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats a few weeks ago because we were heading up to the mountains for some snow play, and neither of the boys really knew anything about snow. I’m glad we got that experience in, because the weather quickly turned warm and we wouldn’t have been able to find any snow to play in if we’d waited until we were ready to row the book.
We also enjoyed some other books about snowy days. First we listened to an audio recording of a Ukrainian folk tale in The Mitten by Alvin Tresselt. Then we read the same story told a little differently in Jan Brett’s The Mitten, as well as its companion book, The Hat. Ian especially liked the last one because he could read the title all by himself, thanks to a few lessons at readingeggs.com. (See my post about it for more information and a promo code if you have someone eager to begin reading!) And we all enjoyed this fun video on YouTube.
I think the boys’ favorite part of the week was when we made “snow” by throwing some ice in the blender. I presented it as a “special treat” (which in Ian’s mind means dessert), prepared to add some cranberry juice if they caught on and protested that I was passing off water as something more delectable. They were thrilled with it plain though. They enjoyed trying to make miniature snowmen, but mostly they just had fun eating it. We turned it into a science lesson by trying to predict what would happen if we left it out in our warm kitchen. After it had melted down to water we boiled it to see how it turned into steam.
There were a number of things I had planned that we never got to: some of the suggested discussions in the Before Five in a Row manual, the pages I put in Ian’s “workbook” from Homeschool Creations, and the sequence cards from HomeSchool Share’s Snowy Day Lapbook which I had printed and laminated. We’ll try to get to all those when we re-row this book with the younger kids in a couple years!
For more snowy fun, check out our time with Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening.