Students love to warm up while listening to a great book on cold winter days! Thankfully, this means that teachers can incorporate the love of books with the many standards to get through each year. For instance, these Snowmen at Night activities for kindergarten are the perfect way to embed an adorable story with several reading skills! Students will have so much fun learning during the winter season with these activities and lessons!
The Importance of Read Alouds
An interactive read aloud embeds a story and focus standards together. Teachers carefully select books that can include a variety of skills, such as making connections and vocabulary. When the lessons begin, the teacher does the reading work while students do the thinking work.
This is an important way to help students improve their comprehension skills. As we can see in Hollis Scarborough’s Reading Rope infographic, comprehension is an essential strand that intertwines with other skills in order for students to become confident readers.
Snowmen at Night Activities for Kindergarten
Snowmen at Night by Caralyn Buehner is a great addition to your winter lesson plans. In this engaging story, a little boy notices that the tall, round snowman he had built the day before looked quite a bit different the next morning. He wonders what his snowman had been up to throughout the night to make it look so droopy.
The clever rhymes and beautiful illustrations take students on a journey to see what the boy imagines snowmen do at night. This includes all sorts of fun things like drinking cocoa in the park (ice-cold, of course) and having an epic snowball fight!
This engaging book is perfect for an interactive read aloud, since it will be shared with students for multiple readings. There are so many fun details in the text and the illustrations that your students will enjoy experiencing this book several times during the read aloud lessons. Here are some engaging activities that you can incorporate into your Snowmen at Night lesson plans:
1. Making Inferences
An important part of reading comprehension is using clues in the story to help them understand what’s happening. You can practice this with your students as you read the story with them.
The detail in the story about drinking ice-cold cocoa will sound funny to your students. When students are interested in an engaging detail like this, it’s the perfect time to practice comprehension strategies! In this case, you could invite them to infer why the snowmen would drink their cocoa cold instead of hot. Each student can write and illustrate a sentence explaining their inference.
(If you’d like another winter inference activity, be sure to check out my post with The Case of the Snowman’s Missing Hat!)
2. Story Retelling
The ability to retell a story is an important comprehension skill that students can practice during an interactive read aloud of Snowmen at Night. Students can use illustrated cards to put the story events in order.
Since this story doesn’t have a conflict-resolution plot, the story events might be a little more challenging to put in order. Instead, you could use the story event cards to have students determine which events were in the story and which weren’t. Either way, it will be great comprehension practice for your students as they work to remember details from the story.
3. Making Connections
Another important part of reading comprehension is for students to make connections to text as they read. You can discuss this as a class while putting together an anchor chart! Students can think about a time when they made something that didn’t last, like the boy who built the snowman.
As students make their connections, you can record them and add them to the anchor chart. Students can also write and illustrate their own connections to the story on a piece of paper.
4. Visualizing
The text of Snowmen at Night also gives students the chance to practice visualizing. Creating pictures in your head is something that readers do, so it’s helpful to practice this with your students.
For example, students can draw a picture of what they visualize when they hear that the snowmen did skating tricks. After drawing their picture, they can also write a sentence to go with it. Students love to share what they visualize with their classmates! It’s fun to see the similarities and differences in their visualizations.
5. Snowmen at Night Craft
Another fun Snowmen at Night activity for kindergarten is a craft project! This gives students the chance to practice their fine motor skills as they create their own snowman craft. Students are so accustomed to drawing on white paper, it’s fun to use black paper for this project so it feels more night-like. Students can use puff paint to create a snowman and winter scene. The colors really pop on the black paper!
For some additional literacy practice, students can build a sentence by cutting and pasting word cards onto the bottom of the paper. They can look at clues like capitalization and punctuation to help them put the words in the correct order. The final product looks great on a winter bulletin board!
Printable Activities for Snowmen at Night
All of the activities mentioned in this post (and many more!) are included in one easy-to-download resources. This set of activities includes everything needed to complete an interactive read aloud in the classroom! It is not simply a packet of worksheets for students to complete after listening to the book.
Instead, the lessons and activities will guide you through the process of teaching multiple standards based on this one book. Thankfully, hours of planning time are saved because everything is carefully organized with easy-to-follow plans! Honestly, students will be reading like never before after diving into this story!
If you’d like to take a closer look at all of the activities included in this resource, you can find it in my TPT store.
Save These Snowmen at Night Activities
Be sure to save this post so you can come back to it later! Just add the pin below to your favorite Pinterest board of teaching ideas. You’ll be able to quickly find these activities when you’re planning your Snowmen at Night read aloud.
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