All About Snow

Denver's weather is all over the place. It can't seem to decide if it wants to be really warm and sunny or really cold and snowy. Last Tuesday we had a snow day! But by Wednesday it was completely gone and the sun was out. Then yesterday it snowed almost a foot! It can't seem to make up it's mind!

Thanks to the snow though, I made a shocking discovery! 2/3 of my students had no idea that snow was made of water!! They've lived their whole lives here in Denver and yet they've never even thought about what its made of.

As a result, I decided to do a little Science and Language Arts integration day all about snow.
We started by discussing everything we know about snow. We made a giant anchor chart of our prior knowledge. We then read a 3rd grade leveled nonfiction piece pulled from the Scholastic Comprehension book here. We as a class took notes (annotating the piece on the Smartboard) and discussed the main idea, purpose and learning in the piece. We then talked about all the facts that we learned about snowflakes, making a giant list on the board.

One of the things my students found the most interesting was the many different types of snowflakes and the different kinds of snow they made. We pulled up the following photograph to see what Wilson Bentley would have seen when taking photographs of snowflakes.

drawnassociation.net

We then talked about the two most common types of snow that we might experience in Denver. We talked about the light powdery snow that is good for skiing and sledding and the thick heavy snow that is good for snowballs and snowmen. We used our classroom smart board to research snow on the websites that I included below. Together as a class... we made a graph depicting our hypotheses about what kind of snow fell last night when we were sleeping. 

We then took our journals outside to experience the snow. They took observations on the snow, noting its look. They then were allowed to touch it and see if it would make good snowballs or fall apart in our hand and be soft for sledding. 

Lucky for them it was Snowman snow!!

We made a snowman as a class! 

Check it out below. 

He's one cool looking snowman.

After making our snowman, we came back to class and wrote paragraphs all about what we learned about snow that day! We still need to work on editing for spelling and grammar but my kids did an excellent job for the most part of remembering to use the writing process and include an introduction and conclusion sentence. 

And... they gave great quality feedback to their friends when we shared them! Three examples of some of the their first pages are posted below. 

I can't wait until tomorrow for when we learn all about the states of matter and how this helps us understand snow, ice, steam and water. 

We're also going to read the amazing children's book "Snowflake Bentley" as suggested by my fellow teacher and cousin, Kristin. It ties in nicely with our study on autobiographies and biographies! I can't wait! I love when so much learning can be connected and made so meaningful! 

Below are some links to other amazing sites to help with learning about snowflakes.

http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blogland/2012/dec/18/snowflake-science/
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/class/class.htm
http://www.amazon.com/Snowflake-Bentley-Jacqueline-Briggs