Snowman Sequencing

Yesterday we got snow--the kind that even stuck on the ground!  It does that every so often where we live. But not enough for it to ever become commonplace.  Whenever it snows, all other activities for the day are banished, and there is one main objective: don all winter gear and get outside.

So that's what we did.  In our snow delight, we did not fail tradition and of course had a snow ball fight, made snow angels, and constructed a snowman.  Here he is in all his grandeur:

 I wish I could say that we gave him a name.  But we didn't.


When we came back inside, thoroughly slushed, I remembered an idea for writing about snowmen that I saw on the Growing Kinders blog. So I changed it up a little bit to fit my kids, and we did something similar.  This is how it worked out for me.

My younger son is too little to know how to do very much of this, so I just had him help me as I modeled what the activity looked like for my older son.  I divided a piece of paper up into four equal parts and drew pictures of snowmen in various stages of completion in each section.  Then I made 2 sets of colorful little word-cutouts that said, "First" "Next" "Then" and "Last."  I used green for "First," yellow and orange for the two middle words, and red for "Last."  That way, I could use common stop light types of phrasing as I was explaining sequencing in this manner.

My younger son helped me apply a title to each section of the snowman paper with the labels I had made.  We talked about "First" being like "go," and "Last" being like "stop." At this point, my older son was ready, with crayon in hand, to work on his own snowmen for awhile.  This is what he came up with, which -- I'm pretty sure -- is the cutest thing ever:

When the oldest was done, we worked on cutting the four sections apart, which IS something my younger son can get excited about.  Now we were ready to reassemble our snowmen, once again, so that they would go in order on the page.  Here's my oldest son's final masterpiece:

and here's the younger son's and mine: 

We had a good time working on our snowmen, both 3-D and 2-D. But, as much fun as I'd like to say we had sequencing our snowmen pictures, I'll still have to admit that making the real thing in the front yard took the cake.