Snow Much Fun!

We are exploring and learning about ice, snow and winter for the next few weeks.

We used salt to melt the ice, and since we've already investigated how salt melts ice in class, we added some watercolors to the ice in this experiment.  The watercolors highlighted the areas of the ice that were melting faster then the rest of the ice.  One kiddo observed that he "could see all the little rivers in the ice" where the ice had melted and paint had settled. 

Of course, once the cubes were murky and melty, our scientists had fun finding other ways to melt ice faster- like warm water.

Our sensory center is snow full of fun this week! (ha, ha)  

In our math center the kiddos have been taking surveys all week!  They've been asking their friends winter-fun questions, such as "Have you ever gone ice skating?" and "Do you like your hot chocolate with marshmallows or without?" and recording the results as a graph.  They're getting to know a little more about their friends with math sneaked in! 

Surveyors hard at work...

We wondered which would melt faster, snow or ice?

...and we discovered that snow melts really fast when we hold it in our hand!

In art, we finger painted a blue sky background for a snowperson painting.

Sensory fun!

As a class, we sorted and graphed our mittens and gloves with interesting results: more pairs of gloves in the first group and far more mittens in the second.

We are also talking about shapes and snowflakes.

Art imitating life!

I love our artists' work!

We did a "melting snowman" project with our buddies last Friday.

Aren't they cute?