Snowflakes!

This week (January 3-7, 2011) we talked about snowmen and snowflakes. Unfortunately there was not enough snow to play in this particular week; if it is too cold outdoors, we simply put the snow in a bucket and play with it indoors. Ah well, maybe next week. Children are fascinated by snow; they always have so many questions! I love to use snowflakes to remind the children that they are all unique just like snowflakes! Of course we have to make lots of snowflake projects to go along with this lesson! We used paper doilies to make snowflakes- we taped several different sizes of paper doilies to a piece of construction paper in the child's choice of color. The children then sponge painted over the doilies. We removed the doilies when the children were done and they were very excited by the results! They were all very proud to hang their individual snowflakes in our classroom to show their friends and parents.
Another snowflake project we did was one I found in the Dec/Jan 2010/11 edition of 'The Mailbox. I gave each of the children several different sizes of green triangles and brown rectangles. They glued these where they wanted on a piece of dark blue or black construction paper to form a night time woods scene. We then used wagon wheel pasta dipped in white paint and pressed them all over the paper for snowflakes! They turned out fantastic, and once again, the children were able to see that no two snowflake pictures were the same!
For science, we looked at and compared close up photographs of snowflakes. The kids did great finding the differences in the snowflakes! In the math center I printed a snowflake tangram pattern from http://www.prekinders.com/ The kids had a great time putting all of the shapes into the correct place to form the snowflake pattern!
There is a way to save a snowflake for viewing by using superglue and a microscope slide, but I have never been able to get this work (mainly because I always glue my fingers together!) I found the instructions for this at http://www.ehow.com/how_2062910_save-snowflakes.html
I will try to post some pics of the kids completed snowflake artwork and get the info for the snowmen section we did this week as well!