Beat the Heat...Throwback Thursday!

Throwback Thursday Linky

   I am linking up with Cara Carroll at The First Grade Parade for her Throwback Thursday Linky.  I really enjoyed it last week and was looking forward to joining in again.  

I decided on this throwback post because it has finally gotten hot and humid in NC!  You may want to think about something cool, like a snowy day!  

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Originally posted on January 9, 2013

 Snowy Day Adventures

     Last week we came back from Winter Break only to realize that in NC it didn't really feel like wintertime.  (Today it was 66 degrees, when we were outside at recess!) I talked to my kiddos about their winter breaks and only two or three had seen snow over break.  I, of course, shared with my students about the beautiful snow that I saw at home.  I showed them my pictures and they were SO excited! 

    
      This gave me an idea!  I wanted to let the students use these snowy pictures to write about their own "snowy day" adventures.  I have seen a ton of cute ideas with snow globes and black and white pics with students inserted. I made my own variation of what I have seen out there!

     I decided to combine our newest grammar topic (verbs) with the black and white snow pictures.  I took three of my pictures from my trip to Ohio and used these as our backgrounds.  We started by asking the students to create lists of things that can be done in the snow.  We remembered that verbs are things that you can do!  After the students created verb lists, I took a picture of each student acting out one of the verbs on that student's list.  Next, we glued the action shots on top of the black and white backgrounds.  Last, we wrote a story about playing in the snow.  The students were allowed to write a make believe story or a real story about their adventures in the snow.

Here are the final projects!  They had a blast making these! The student on the left is "rolling" in the snow and the student on the right is of course, making a snow angel!  The black sheet has one of my student's verb list. 

This is one of the pictures we used for our snowy day writing project.  For those of you who life in sunny warm places and may need a snowy picture, you can download this for free!   Just click on the picture and you can grab a copy from Google Docs. 

     From my snowy day activity, I created this grammar and writing packet.  The packet includes the directions for our snow verb writing activity, handwriting paper, a few comprehension questions, a verb search sheet to be completed after reading the book, and a noun and verb sort. My students have been doing the verb search this week and loving it!  

     They are reading the story online at http://www.wegivebooks.org/books/the-snowy-day?auto_launch=1.  It is a great site that I found via Pinterest.  It does not read the story to the students, but it allows you to display it on a Smartboard or read it on multiple computers. 

     You can get your copy just by clicking on the picture above and heading over to my TpT site!  While you are there, go ahead and check out my new set of questions for the book Nate the Great and the Snowy Trail!  Who doesn't LOVE Nate and his silly friends?!  My favorite is always Rosamond and in this story she is as crazy as ever!  Go get yourself a copy and have some snowy fun with Nate the Great!          

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I hope the snowy day can help you cool down a bit!  Enjoy the rest of your week.  

-Michelle