Learning is fun, especially with a good theme! Host an upper elementary snow day where we look at writing, art, class incentives and even geometry!
When you hear the phrase, "Snow Day!" you think of a day when school is cancelled because of the weather, but let's turn Snow Day into a day where you bring a good theme into the classroom to increase engagement and learning!
First of, start the day off by having these Image Hunt Christmas Snow Day Activity Sheets along with the adorable Squishy Snowman Pens ready on their desks for when they walk into class. Your students will be so excited and I guarantee they will quietly and busily seek for these fun wintery images while you take attendance. You can easily make this image hunt a competition of who can find the images the fastest. To save time you can have them work in teams or stop them at a certain letter! To extend this activity and make it more academic, have the students orally share out where they found each hidden image. This will help them practice both using prepositions as well as using descriptive language. This is a great activity to help your English Language Learners or even shy students!
Something else that I love are these Hip Santa Sticker Scenes. You can use them in many different ways, but what I like to do, is to use these as a class incentive. Each week we have a behavior goal. That can be walking to and from lunch in a straight line, or class participation. Whatever the goal is, each time the students display that behavior, they earn a sticker to add to the scene. When the sticker scene is filled out, the entire class earns a reward like a directed drawing, popcorn party or a homework pass. You can also use these as individual behavior rewards.
An upper elementary snow day needs to have a good craft! I love these Thumbprint Snowflake Christmas Ornament Craft Kit. There are a lot of adorable books that talk about each snowflake being different and unique - just like our thumbprints, and just like we all are. This craft reinforces that idea and helps build classroom community! To extend this, you can have them make a connection and write it on the back of the snowflake.
Speaking of snowflakes, look at this adorable Snowflake String Art Craft. What I did was have them work in small groups to create their own unique Snowflake String Art Craft. Any group work activity helps them with their interpersonal and communication skills. After they have created their work of art, you can instantly turn this craft into a math activity! They can seek and find and then explain where all the different types of obtuse, acute and right angles are. It is a quick, stress free assessment of some geometry skills. The best part is that you can easily take the strings off this and store for the next year!
For writing, these Create & Write Winter Giant Sticker Scenes are great! They arrange the stickers anywhere on the writing paper scene. As an informal assessment, challenge your students to use the grammar or writing skills you have been focusing on and create two sentences to show what they know. For my class, we were working on adverbs and alliteration. You can easily have them practice other figurative language skills or descriptive writing for this. They love it and it is way more fun than a regular quiz!
Another fun writing activity to add into your upper elementary snow day uses these cute Snow-Filled Surprise Globes.
Pass them out with the challenge trapping them in a homemade snow globe using Glitter Winter Pom-Poms, a little Craft Snow and Snow Globe Cookie Boxes.
To extend this, you can have them write about how their character was trapped in a snow globe and how they were going to break free.
What snow day wouldn't be complete without a friendly snowball fight with these Funny Face Plush Snowballs? You can have the kids earn them by exhibiting great behavior, or raffle them off by solving math equations correctly. Then at the end of the day, divide the class in two and let them at it!
Last but not least, celebrate a Snow Day well done by gifting them a little take home science experiment with these Magic Snow.
Simply add water to this white powder and it quickly transforms into an interesting texture. Your students will love working across genres and subjects all day long, and you can use so many of these products in many different ways to make learning fun!
