Are your lesson plans ready for wintertime? After the excitement of the holidays, it can be difficult to plan for activities that get your students excited and engaged. Luckily, the cold weather provides plenty of opportunities for learning that is fun! There’s building a snowman together, drinking hot chocolate, and winter creative writing activities, just to name a few.
Here are some of my favorite winter activity ideas, and I hope they’ll inspire you to get creative in your lesson planning!
One of my favorite topics for wintertime lessons is ICE!
The frozen water kids see on the ground, hanging from eaves, or on the local pond is a perfect springboard for science lessons.
Ask your students about their observations outside if you have ice around your school. Then, lead them into a discussion of different forms of matter. Even younger students can begin to understand the relationship between water and ice, preparing them for more in depth learning about the water cycle in future years.
You can also grab some ice from outside (or from the freezer), and observe what happens as time passes at room temperature. This is a perfect opportunity for students to record observations and make hypotheses about why ice melts. Students will be engaged, and you’ll be covering important science and writing skills!
Another of my favorite winter activity ideas is creating beautiful snowscapes with puffy paint.
You will need to mix equal parts shaving cream and white glue to create the paint, and provide students dark blue or black construction paper for their canvas.
This activity is hands-on and a little messy, but so much fun! Students can create a scene using their puffy paint, or a snowman picture. They can then write a narrative to match their picture. You can have students share their narrative with the class or with a partner. Art, tactile learning, and writing skills are all involved in this one lesson!
A true student favorite for winter is my Stop Motion Animation resource.
Using a snowman animation from a real Disney animator, this activity gets kids super excited about creative writing. They will also get to create their own stop motion animation. This is an exciting and unique activity that they may never have experienced before.
Included in this resource, you’ll find over three weeks of writing lessons and engaging activities. Your students will be thrilled to get creative with animation and writing!
Another favorite is having students (especially if you are teaching virtual), build a digital snowman and write about it! Google slides make it simple for students to copy and paste items to design the snowman. Then, let their creative juices flow with writing about their snowman!
I hope these ideas get you excited about winter learning, and ready to enjoy the season with your students!
Check out these digital holiday centers for more winter activity ideas!