Sledding!

Today the word of the day was sledding. I had planned to take the kids outside and actually go sledding but alas the Michigan weather did not want to cooperate (it was January in Michigan I naviely thought we would have snow!!! Oh well). I found a cute sledding craft online and it gave me the opportunity to introduce the concept of up and down.

I made a teacher example first of the activitiy and used that to teach the lesson. Then I let the kids make their own. Again, I forgot the cotton balls, so we used marshmallows. :)

Language Goals
Expressive: up and down
Receptively: Is questions

I started the lesson by having everyone stand up and then squat down to the floor. We did this a few times talking about being up and down. Then I had one student stand up while the other students stayed down and asked another student "Who is up?" I went around the group till everyone had a turn and then repeated with down.

Next, I got out my cute sledder and put him in different positions, either up or down. Asking the students "Is he up the hill or down the hill?"  I was looking for just the pharse "up the hill" or "down the hill" from each student. If your kiddos have more language, of course expect  more from them. After each student had one or two turns. I let the students  make their own, great cutting skills. Then I would tell them where to put the sledder, either up the hill or down the hill. 

**Note** I taped a small craft stick to the back to make the sledder more stable and it seemed to help.

Sled craft

Winter Centers

Torn winter scene
For this center, have a blue piece of construciton paper as the background. Then give the students a white piece of paper to rip in half. This will be the ground. Glue on the bottom. Rip the remaining half into small pieces for the snow. Glue in the sky like snow falling.

For Math today we used Snowmen counting sheet and counted out "snowballs" to a given number. I held up a number between 1-8 (these are the numbers we have been working on, the sheets go up to 10). I gave each student a handful of marshmallows for snowballs. I did an example and had the students try to match.
Snowman counting There are also sheets that go up to 20 and ones with penguins on it!! Lots of other goodies at this site too.