Project objective: to honor children’s creative ideas and allow them to harness confidence in themselves, while connecting them to nature during a hands-on, play-based experience.
Skill development: number concepts such as one-to-one correspondence, simple subtraction, quantities, number terms, and counting; sensory experience; confidence; creativity and imagination; language; turn taking; cause and effect; science concepts involving prediction, inquiry, and observation while engaging in a science/states of matter activity.
Snow is a wonderful loose part for young children during the winter season. This year the dry snow has not been ideal for making snowmen. By bringing snow inside, the children were able to shape it more easily as its consistency changed in the warmer atmosphere. (I offered mittens to the children if they wanted to wear them while packing the snow into balls.)
An assortment of natural loose parts was available for the children to use on their zero waste snowman, all of which were compostable and many were harvested right from the woods at our school.
If you don’t have wild spaces near your school, you’ll still find many of these materials in groomed areas with trees. Get creative and use what you can find for snowman materials. Think outside the box! Any natural materials will do; we have used golden rod weeds for hair and feathers for arms!
Here is the list of natural materials we used on this particular day:
- snow
- corn kernels
- small flowers
- sticks
- wooden popsicle sticks
- toothpicks
- corn silk
- small pinecones
- yarn
Other materials:
- mason jar: wide-mouth worked best to put the snowman on the mason jar lid and put the jar over the snowman. I twisted the jar on the lid upside down so the melting snow wouldn’t leak out. Setting the snowman on a plate instead of putting it in a jar might work better for those bigger snowmen. I like using the jars so the snowmen stay standing longer during the melting process.
- mittens
- a plate to build the snowman on
When creating with open-ended art materials, some children have to build their confidence when coming up with creative ideas and using those ideas to engage in the activity. Children have voiced they are worried about their project looking different than the other children’s and saying they don’t know how to do it.
Many children are used to cookie-cutter activities, where the uniformity of the projects is the desired end result, but this doesn’t allow them to build on their creative ideas. Instead, we are promoting the idea that the teacher’s work is better than the children’s work, and that it is more important to be the same as everyone else, rather than highlight the children’s unique ideas.
Honoring children’s ideas and creativity is what drives my teaching.
My go-to phrase for children who are nervous about their project looking different is “Everyone’s will look different because everyone has different ideas. We get to see what everyone’s brains come up with!”
After saying this to a child who is hesitant, I walk to the other children and point out specifically what they did with their snowman. “Oh, I see you used corn silk to give your snowman hair!” and “I see two flowers on your snowman’s head; can you tell me how your snowman is using them?” This way the attention is off the hesitant child, and my objective comments show the child that every idea is valued.
Without the teacher hovering over a child, it gives room to mentally and physically gather the courage to come up with creative ideas and start engaging. I check back in with hesitant children to highlight what creative ideas they have come up with.
The variation in the children’s snowmen at the end was evidence that working with loose parts builds confidence and creativity. We had zero waste snow animals, snow families, and even snow rocket ships!
Our group rhythm for this activity:
- We read the book “Snowballs” by Lois Ehlert, which has many natural loose part ideas to use for creating zero waste snowmen.
- We gathered at the table for the children to make snowmen, and once we were done, we put them into jars so we could watch them melt.
- We went outside to sing the song “5 Little Snowmen” with our snowmen beside us and noticed the changes that took place: which parts melted right away, whether they still looked like snowmen, size differences, and pieces that fell off.
- We sang the song “Five Little Snowmen” with our melting snowmen beside us.
- We put our snowmen back inside until the end of the day, and when we got back, we were thrilled to see most of them had completely melted.
“Five little snowmen that
Each had a funny hat
Out came the sun
And melted one
Now, what do you think of that!”
-author unknown