I’m planning my third grader’s “winter” party this year. It’s a little challenging finding winter related things that don’t have to do with Christmas – thought I’d share the plan here in case anyone else could find this information useful.
Craft 1: Beanie snowmen: We will make snowmen (and women :-p) out of socks, rice, rubberbands, buttons. I’ll prepare the base snowperson (don’t want rice all over the floor of the classroom :-/ ) ahead of time and they will decorate, etc. This video is basically where I got the inspiration and I’m going to do make the base snowperson the exact same way, but I’m not going to use pins in the classroom b/c I don’t know if the teachers or parents would like that. I’m planning to use some heavy duty glue dots that I found at Joann’s. They were $7, but Joann’s often has coupons for 50%off, etc. These glue dots are non-toxic and stick very well – stuff doesn’t come off unless you yank it. I also bought googly eyes and orange pipe cleaners for the nose ( you can just poke the pipe cleaner straight through the sock – no glue dot required there). I found adult male tube socks at Walmart for a really good price (10 pair in one pack) for about $7. One pair will make 2 snowmen so not bad. The only other thing I’m adding is that I’m going to get some Christmas socks from the dollar store and cut them up to make ugly Christmas sweaters for the snowmen – gotta inject some humor in this somewhere! :-p
Here’s a pic of how ours turned out (Pinterest fail or win?):
Craft 2: Pipe cleaners and beads to make snowflakes. I’m going to bring an example and make the snowflakes out of pipe cleaners ahead of time so the kids just have to add the beads. I bought relatively big sized beads (pony beads work well) b/c if the beads are too small it would take way too long.
Game 1: Cup stacker – stack 28 cups into a pyramid in under 1 minute. Using 28 winter cups, the students will try to make a pyramid in under a minute – this will probably take a few rounds for any one kid to get – takes a while to figure out how many to use as the base. I’ll bring 2 sets of 28 cups so 2 kids can do this at the same time. Or we can just have 1 kid at a time and if they master it pretty quickly, we can add on cups. We’ll probably need to do this one on the floor b/c the desks may not be big enough to hold the pyramid.
Game 2: Snowball transfer – transfer snowballs from one bucket to another using only your mouth. Using ping pong balls and 2 small winter buckets, we’ll have the kids transfer the balls from one bucket to the other using only their hands. Initially, we’ll have the buckets right next to each other but we can make it more challenging by moving them further apart if they master it quickly. One kid will go at a time. I’ll bring more than 21 spoons, so each kid can keep their spoon – don’t want to transfer germs or anything.
Game 3: Winter charades – I’ll make a set of cards with winter words on them and the kids can act out one at a time. They have one minute to get someone to guess and the person that guess correctly gets a point. If we run out of cards, I’ll bring some extra (non-winter) charade cards from home so they can keep playing, but hopefully we’ll have enough.
All the games will be minute to win it style so you’ll need to make sure you have a stopwatch function on your phone or something like that so you can time them – I just have a Clock app on mine and that does most everything.