Winter Math and Manipulatives

Sorting and matching are two things my two-year-old class can do extremely well.  Many of my children will methodically do a side by side comparison of the object or picture they are looking for the match of.  I usually limit the number of matches they are making to 5 but some of my oldest twos can actually match over twenty items.

Snowflake Matching

Three sets of matching snowflakes that are visually very distinct from each other so as not to be confusing.  I would definitely suggest printing this out on cardstock and laminating it for durability.

PDF Link: Snowflake Match

Winter Art

Here are a couple of ideas that I used for winter art, some of these would actually work well for summer too:

Frozen Paint

This is a really fun open ended art idea.  I used liquid watercolors and water combined.  You could even have your children help you with pouring the watered down liquid watercolor into the ice cube tray.  For this activity I let the children use plastic pipettes to put them in the tray.  In this way you can slip in a fine motor activity as well!  Afterward we placed a popsicle stick in each cube before placing it in the freezer:

Here is a picture of our ice tray at the tail end of heavy use.  Instead of dumping it out after the first time the children used it my assistant put it back in the freezer and pulled it out multiple times over the course of the next few days.

This is one child spreading the paint across his paper using the popsicle stick to push it.

Frozen Chalk

This is another open ended art activity that my students loved and we reused over the course of a couple days by refreezing.  Whenever I can I always let the children make materials with me whether its play dough, salt dough, or frozen chalk.  I use smaller measuring cups so that more children have the opportunity to pour ingredients and I always let them mix.  

Frozen chalk is really simple to make.  All you need is equal parts cornstarch and water.  Add the food coloring to the water before mixing in the cornstarch.

I found these really cool ice trays at the thrift store and bought them thinking I could use them for some fine motor activity.  They were perfect for freezing chalk!

Here's an example of how some of the pink frozen chalk worked out for them...

Winter Fine Motor Ideas

Fine motor activities help children in that they provide the opportunity to work on developing the muscles that will help them write, cut, or do self-help tasks like buttoning and tying shoes.  I offer my class a variety of fine motor activities that are often available on trays for them to choose.  

One of the simplest ideas for a fine motor activity is pushing pom poms into a container top.  We use the Gerber baby cereal containers.  It is very easy for us to ask for them at our school as we have an infant classroom or many of our children have siblings that were born in the past year.  Sometimes we cover the container tops so that they go along with the theme.  The children love this!

Here is an example of some winter animals that we made to "feed" pom poms to:

a penguin...

a polar bear...

On a side note, the polar bear's teeth didn't stand a chance and lasted maybe to the end of the morning.  Eventually we just removed them.  

While the idea of making them look like animals was originally mine, I will give the credit of creation to my assistants.  I often like to come up with weird projects I need them to make at nap time.  Now they often come up with animals that go along with our themes and automatically work on making these the week preceding a theme.  I am so lucky to have such creative and motivated assistants.

Winter Play Dough Mats

Igloo

We actually made this play dough mat by cutting and pasting construction paper together and drawing the lines.  It's pretty easy to make one as a word document though if you want.  My children practiced rolling balls first to incorporate a fine motor activity and then they can push it into each rectangle to make the ice block.  

We used blue play dough for this and I let my class help me make it by measuring and mixing up the ingredients:

Here is the link to print out a copy:
Teaching Two Year Olds Igloo Mat


Snowflakes

PDF Link:  Make Snowflakes Play Dough Mat

Winter Science

There are so many fun science projects you can do with your children for winter!  I had a few that I really wanted to share:

Snowstorm in a Bottle

Honestly, I didn't read the directions too carefully and it actually said jar.  We made do with the bottle but this would work so much better with a jar.  All you need is some baby oil, white paint, iridescent glitter, water, and Alka Seltzer.  My two-year-old class did help put the ingredients in (although it would have been easier with a jar).  Here's how it turned out:

And ... I might not have used the iridescent glitter either.  Although it would have been cooler with it.  

My kids loved watching the paint bubble and float while carrying the glitter around with it.  They were almost transfixed.  

If you would like to see how this "Snowstorm in a Jar" can turn out if you actually follow the directions, I found this project on Growing a Jeweled Rose.  You will find the instructions and much better pictures of the process on her site.

Winter Sensory Ideas

I really wanted to post some ideas for winter, especially since we had three snow days last week!  For the month of January, my class explored winter and the subtopics of ice and snow.  Here are some of the sensory activities we did for the various topics.  

Winter Activities

One topic we discussed was winter activities.  Since many of my kids had never seen snowboarding or skiing, I not only showed them images but decided to hot glue popsicle sticks onto Mega Bloks figures.

We used two small popsicle sticks for skis.  And one large stick to serve for snowboards...

As you can see we also froze a container of water so that they had a cold surface to play on.  They LOVED this activity!

Shaving Cream for Snow

Yup.  Its impossible not to go there.  Shaving cream is just so much fun for children even if it is ohhhhh so messy.  We did use shaving cream multiple days but switched out the objects we used to play in it depending on what we were discussing.  I will be honest though, don't turn your back.  You could end up with shaving cream beards and wigs...

cars

people, vehicles, and trees

winter animals!