A week on snowmen

Snowmen Stamping - This station will be out all week for the kiddos to enjoy.  They get to create their own snowmen.

The Great Snowman Experiment - Over the weekend I froze 6 balloons full of water to create two fabulous ice snowmen, one to put outside and one to keep inside.  Our question was:  Which snowman will melt first?

The kiddos each have a "Snowman Experiment" science journal to record their hypothesis and their observations.

I brought out the frozen balloons and we talked about the experiment.  They helped me peel off the balloons and then they observed balls of ice.

Then we carefully stacked the two snowmen (using a bit of salt to help them stick together).  

We decorated them and put one outside and left the other on the table.  Now it was time for our hypothesis:  Which one would melt faster?  At first some of the kiddos thought the one outside would melt first, but then we remembered it's colder outside than in the preschool.  The kiddos drew in their journals a picture of their hypothesis.

Classroom Snowman - While we were in the business of decorating snowmen, the kiddos helped to decorate our indoor class snowman (just in case we don't get enough snow this week to create a snowman outside).

 

Observation - Time to record an observation in our journals.  We looked closely at our indoor snowman.  He had some dribbles running down and was starting to form a small puddle!  We quickly drew this in our journals and then headed outside to check out our other snowman.  

Outdoor Snowman - Hmm... No puddle yet!  We drew this quickly in our journals and headed back in.   Here is a peek at the observations in our journals...

Check out the blog that I got the idea for this experiment from:  here.

 Indoor Snowball Fight! - The kiddos were pretty excited to pelt me with snowballs, I'm glad they weren't cold!   They liked pelting each other too!

Another Observation - Time to for moms to come, so we made one more observation as we were suiting up to go outside.  A bigger puddle on the indoor snowman, and our outdoor snowman is just beginning to create a puddle.  

 

We're super curious how they will look tomorrow morning.

Snowman Sock Puppet - These turned out super cute!  I had the kiddos lay out the face they wanted, then I used a glue gun to stick them on.

 Check out the blog where I got the idea for these cute puppets:  here.

A chalk plea for snow - While I was quite happy to pull out the chalk again, I am sad to have grass peeking through at the edge of the driveway.  Come on!  Snow please! 

 The kiddos abandoned their shovels this morning for sidewalk chalk.

Snowman Experiment - Day 2 - Outdoor Snowman - He looks pretty good, huh!

Snowman Experiment - Day 2 - Indoor Snowman -  He does not look so good.  His head fell off during the night, leaving a puddle on the table.  The kiddos felt the water and proclaimed it cold.  They made note of our two snowmen in their science journals.

 

Snowman Jars - I painted these white over the weekend and was trying to decide how the kiddos should create the faces.  I finally just went with sharpies so some of them are a bit abstract, ha!

 

Snowman Experiment - Indoor - Well, the two remaining parts of our indoor snowman melted apart while we were finishing up our jars.  So we figured it was a good time to do another observation.

There was a lot of splashing involved in this observation, so I grabbed a towel.  Next thing I know two kiddos had the snowman parts wrapped up in the towel.  They tell me that they have to keep it warm so it doesn't melt.  ...   Right now Ms. Sara is thinking:  Oh man, epic fail!  They've got it all backwards!  Ha ha!  So we chatted again about melting and warm versus cold.

 

Craft Foam -  What fun!  I found this bucket of winter craft foam on clearance.  The kiddos and I enjoyed creating winter scenes. 

Another look at our snowmen -  Our indoor snowman is pretty much gone.   Our outdoor snowman looks pretty good.  I guess we'll see how many days he lasts!