Kindergarten Vertical and Horiztontial Snowmen

And for the Kindergarten winter project...MORE snowmen. Can you tell I love them? So do the kids :)

I use the words vertical and horizontal so much in my classroom that I felt the need to have it as the main objective for a Kindergarten lesson. Before this project I had to repeat myself and walk around to make sure everyone was the right way, I don't think I have had to do that once since we finished these!

I was inspired once again by Pinterest from this post.

Day 1: Read a story involving snowmen (can't remember which one!) as they are always excited to have me read to them...Then I introduced the vocabulary of vertical and horizontal. They caught on pretty quick to each word and we used our arms when we said the word to help remind our brains which way is which. We did a draw along for our snowman in white crayon to make sure we successfully used the whole page and made our snowmen as tall as possible. I still had a few who made it less than a quarter up the page.... The last part of the class was spent painting in the snowmen and the ground they were on.

Day 2: I was surprised to find out over a week later (with our 6 day rotation) that many students remembered the words and showed the correct way with their arms. Of course they struggled saying both vertically and horizontally (but come on they are 5!). We started this class with a new paper that was smaller and had it go horizontally. We drew together and painted another snowman drawing this time having 3 or more snowmen on the page. Once we got cleaned up we gathered in front of the projector to look at different cartoon pictures of snowmen and talked about all the different ways a snowman could look. So very happy with taking the time to do this otherwise I think they would of either all done a classic snowman or just added things endlessly to theirs. They went back to their spots and got to work on adding oil pastels to their first vertical snowman.

Day 3: They still remembered vertical and horizontal and used oil pastels once again to complete their horizontal snowman pictures. This only took about 15 minutes so I introduced the next project in the same class.

Two schools were hung with the 1st grade winter windows since the snowman process was the same.

Kennedy Elementary...

McDill Elementary...

Jefferson Elementary...

Had so much to hang up at Jefferson that I could only fit this small batch!