"Snow" Much Fun at School

I'm calling this my Southern Snowpal. This is probably as close to a real snowpal as the students in my area will get this year!! I got this idea from a great blogspot I found last week. I took 3 white balloons , filled them with water and froze them.  Then I put a hat on him and a scarf. On the blogspot I saw she had cute eyes, a nose, and a mouth on it. It was so cute!! Well this is not a great replica of what I saw from the blog! At least I tried!! I just didn't freeze the balloon quite right. I should have made sure they froze flat on the bottom. That way, I think they would have stacked better. This is a FANTASTIC idea for our science unit on water. Great way to show that water's weight doesn't change after it's been frozen. Next year's Southern Snowpal will look a lot better....I hope!!

Last week, I centered most of my math activities with a Snow/Winter theme. Since we have gotten back from our Holiday break, we have been focusing on Unit 5 of our 1st grade Common Core Standards in Math. We have a few more weeks to work on this unit. This unit is all about addition and subtraction up to 20. I wanted to create some activities that would keep the kiddos engaged while they focused on mastery in these standards. I looked on Pinterest for a few ideas and I was able to find a couple that I could expand on to make them work for our standards. As you scroll down the pictures, I hope you can find some ideas that will help you with your wintry plans.

This is an activity I created called Marshmallow Math. I made these mugs from
construction paper and had them laminated. The students took a small bag of real
mini marshmallows and they took a whole number like 10 and decomposed it into 2 parts.
This student started with 8 marshmallows and then decomposed the number into 3 and 5 and showed it on her mugs of hot cocoa. Next, she wrote 3+5 next to the number 8 that was on a recording sheet. The students at this
center continued doing this with different whole numbers until they completed the recording
sheet. I have a more "polished" product called "Marshmallow Math and a Little Hot Cocoa" that I created after
I did this activity. It costs $3.00, but it has several activities that includes subtraction, adding 3 whole numbers, and
missing addends. It also has some really cute mugs that you can print out on cardstock and use for lots of activities. The students LOVED doing this center!! Oh...by the way. They got to eat the marshmallows afterward. YUM!
Here's the link to the product on TpT:
Marshmallow Math with a Little Hot Cocoa

This activity came from my Pinterest page under my  board  "Just January".  You can't tell from the picture but I wrote different numbers from 1-9 all over the snowman. Beside the snowman are 2 large ten frames. One student took 2 beanbags and threw them gently on the snowman. The partner placed that many round snowballs (round construction pieces) on the ten frames that equaled the 2 numbers. (Example: 5 + 9 = 14. One ten frame would be filled up and then there would be 4 "snowballs" on the other ten frame.) Then both students would write the equation on a recording sheet.

I'm an absolute fan of The Mailbox magazine! This activity idea came from there. I took 2 small buckets with shovels and filled them with cotton balls to represent snowballs. The students took a shovel full and counted how many snowballs they had in all. Then they decomposed the number in to 2 parts and recorded the equation on their recording sheet that was called, "Snowy Sums". 

This was a simple activity called "Snow Many Buttons!" There were 10 snowmen with different amounts of buttons on their fronts. The students would write each set from 1 snowman and record it as an addition sentence. Then they would use the strategy of counting on or the number line to get the sum.

I also had a center using snowmen pictures with 4 snowballs. The students rolled 3 dice and put that many small buttons on each snowball body (the top snowball was the head). Then they wrote the 3 whole number equation on a small dry erase board and we talked about different strategies to use to get the sum. I didn't have a picture for this one, but it was a very engaging and great learning activity!

There are a couple of more things I'd like to share about this unit, but I'll save it for tomorrow!