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| Snow by © trishadian Hmmm. Snow. Sitting here in early January at 7:30 at night with the temperature in the upper 70's wondering what I might say about snow. ; ) Well, I guess I have seen snow. Probably when I was between 4 and 6 months old. Then I probably saw it again. When I was around 15 or 18 months. <giggle> Can't say I remember any of that. There may be a picture of me in a snowsuit roaming around here somewhere. I guess I'll have to go looking. Then there was the time I was in Spain. (Almost 20 years ago! I can't believe it.) In June or July. We were in one small town, and we got on a train and went to another small town. There we got on a special kind of train. It climbs up mountains by attaching itself to the tracks by means of a kind of zipper. And we went up, and up, and up, and up... Then, for some reason it couldn't get all the way to the station so we had to WALK up for a few minutes. Once we were there and looked around, I couldn't tell that we were high up in a mountain. The way the area was formed you really couldn't see down the mountain. You could look up however to see even more mountains. (I think that also fooled me, cause I'm very used to being surrounded by 'mountains' while still being basically at sea level.) So anyway, our friendly guides suggested we hike further up and we all agreed. By the time we'd been climbing for maybe close to an hour, about half of us had had enough and were lagging behind. The others wanted to continue, so we split up, and let them go on their adventure. Us worn out ones did go up a bit further. Slowly. And there it was. A huge sheet of shave ice! At least that's what it looked like to me. I was assured that it was snow, even though it didn't look the way I thought snow should look. So I got to see it, and even hold some in my hands. When we all got back together later that afternoon we discovered that the other group had been able to look over at mountains that were in France. I thought that was neat, but I was quite content with my experience with the snow. I'm a preschool teacher. When I look through my curriculum books I can find many interesting activities dealing with snow. Can't use any of them. (Well, okay, there are a couple that I can modify, but you know what I mean) Of course that doesn't mean I can't come up with SOMETHING. I can't remember whether I came up with this one on my own or if I read about it somewhere. I had a lot of scratch paper around and decided to put it to use. The children and I scrunched it up into balls until we had a good amount. Then we took the balls outside in baskets and had ourselves a 'snowball' fight. It was great fun. Once they realized they could throw these balls as hard as they wanted AT people, ou couldn't stop them. At one point they all decided to gang up on me. My biggest problem was I got tired of bending down to pick up the balls, so I decided to sit on the ground. Someone came up with the bright idea of dumping a whole basket of 'snowballs' on top of me. I laughed so hard. : ) Another year I got the children even closer to snow. I made sure I had a lot of ice in the freezer. Then I brought out my shave-ice maker. The children and I took turns cranking the handle to cut the ice. Each batch wa placed in a ziploc bag and returned to the freezer while we made some more. When we had enough(barely) I put it all in the water table and the children were able to play with 'snow'. Making balls. Throwing it at each other. Getting cold hands. Too bad it didn't last longer I'm going to have to do that again some year. With even more ice. : ) Trisha |
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