Fun Friday Program

As we began making plans for this winter, I decided that we had a great opportunity to provide to our elementary age students once a month on a Friday afternoon.  Our school district gives the children a half day on a the second Friday of every month, giving the teachers a chance to have meetings, trainings, and other professional development opportunities.

We decided to provide a program for children in 1st – 4th grade with a 45-minute program on these half days.  Our first was last Friday in the midst of our own professional development workshop and a smaller than regular Friday staff.  It was a great success in that I had 25 students attend with younger siblings, begging and pleading to be allowed to attend as well.  Our focus was on snow and since the Philadelphia area has not seen as much as I would like, this was the perfect theme.

I shared a couple of winter and snow poems from Snow, Snow: Winter Poems for Children by Jane Yolen as well as Iguanas in the Snow: and Other Winter Poems by Francisco X. Alarcon.  Then I also read aloud the picture book Over and Under the Snow by Kate Messner and Christopher Silas Neal.  During the story we discussed animals that you might see during the winter and others that would be hibernating.  And finally I shared some facts and we discussed Snowflake Bentley, the first man to take a picture of a snowflake.  Many of the children has already seen the book by the same title by Jacqueline Briggs Martin.

For the craft, I made homemade puffy paint by mixing equal parts Elmer’s glue and Barbasol shaving cream.  The kids had the chance to create their own snowflake using the puffy paint as finger paint of by using popsicle sticks.  A few kids got a little out of control with the paint, but thankfully it was easy to clean off the tables and the kids seemed to have some much fun!  Our February theme will be focused on tangrams, hopefully we’ll have as many kids sign up again!