Winter Party!
Our last week of class before the holiday break is our Fun Club Winter Party, which the kids greatly anticipate and look forward to.
Students came in and went straight up to Mrs. Ramsay and Miss Julie to paint their Cinnamon Dough Snowmen with fabulous sparkling-snow glitter paint…
They then made beautiful decoupage collages of tissue paper snowflakes on aluminum foil squares…
We topped it all off with a discussion of two-dimensional (circle) and three-dimensional (sphere)objects as we rolled little spheres of cookie dough and baked snowball cookies. 2D is explained as flat, like a movie that we can’t reach into and grab, or a flat circle on the chalkboard…3D being like a 3D movie, or objects in space that we can actually hold, like the small ball I use to illustrate. We then discuss what is the same and what is different about a circle and a sphere. During our cooking time, we discussed other objects that were spheres as well…our list included: oranges, soccer balls, basket balls, hot air balloons, apples, snowballs, snowmen (as they are assembled), Earth, and the planets, to name a few.
Remember, any activity can become a rich learning activity if you just open your eyes and ears and look for teachable moments. Even passing the cooking bowl to stir (everyone does 1-2-3-pass it on!) can be done in French, German, Spanish, Japanese, and Mandarin. Senior Kindergarten practices skip counting by tens and counting backwards during cooking as well–something to do while the mixer is mixing.
SNOWBALL COOKIES:
1 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup powdered sugar
2 tsp. vanilla (i just eyeball it)
1 tsp. salt
2 cups sifted flour (yeah, but who sifts it really? pas moi.)
Combine butter, sugar, vanilla, salt…add chopped nuts if you want (I don’t because of allergy concerns). Slowly mix in flour. Roll into little “snowballs” or spheres…makes about two dozen. As an added step, children may roll their spheres in powdered sugar “snow” before baking. Bake at 350 degrees for 8-10 minutes.
The rest of our Winter Party was spent in playtime and a special movie with lollipops. (We watched “The Snowy Day”, “Click Clack Moo, Cows That Type”, and “The Day Jimmy’s Boa Ate the Wash”, each about ten minutes long…all from an excellent Scholastic dvd series which I highly recommend. dvd book series)
All our little friends were sent home with their snowmen, snowflake pictures, and snowball cookies–and that is the way to end a Winter Party and begin a long holiday!
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