Winter Is For Snow Part 1

Every now and again you find a great book that you realize can be used for multiple grades and for multiple projects.  Winter is For Snow written by Robert Neubecker is certainly one of those great books.  It's written as an argument between a big brother (who loves snow) and his little sister (who hates snow). The fun part for the kids is to see how the big brother brings his little sister around to his way of thinking. 

I read this book in Kindergarten, First, Second and Third grade and it was a hit all the way around!
Today I'm just going to share second grade and third grade with you (on account I forgot to take pictures of K and 1st before I sent the projects home!).

In second grade we looked at the pages in the book that featured the buildings where the siblings lived.  We talked about our own neighborhoods and what they looked like.  We made a list of details you might see on our our neighborhood streets such as: parked cars, snowmen, street signs, trees, people walking bundled up, fences, etc.

After the discussion I let the classes choose which type of blue paper they wanted to use to create the "icy" sky.  I had sky blue, turquoise, and regular blue available.  Most kids gravitated straight to the turquoise.  We drew our own snow covered streets in pencil first, painted with tempera cakes (I use Prang), and lastly, outlined with permanent marker to help re-define any details that got painted over.

Here are some of the results:

I originally saw this lesson on Pinterest and tracked it down to this blog Artisan Des Arts.  I'm not sure if that is where it originated; if you know who did design this let me know so I can give credit where credit is due.  This project made a great link with this book for 3rd grade. With the 3rd grade, we talked about Point of View - not just in the literary sense with questions like: "How do you know which character in the book is talking?" and "What are the personal views of each character?"  We also discussed Point of View from an art perspective.  That you can have a bird's eye view, a worm's eye view and in this case - a point of view where the person's head is tipped backwards so part of the face is obscured. 

We drew in pencil, painted in tempera cakes (again, I use Prang Tempera Cakes), and then used stamps from Oriental Trading and white tempera paint for the snowflakes.  This was a nice lesson too, to show how to mix various skin tones.

My painty stamps.

Here are some examples of the finished products: