moving snow, building dudes

It snowed today! Woo-hoo!! Yippppeeee!!!

Six glorious inches of fluffy, packable, movable, sled-able, wonderful snow.

We were due. My little ones needed a good snow like this so they could (finally!) use the ‘Build A Snowman’ kit that has been sitting around here for two winters now. They needed this snow so they could learn how to pack a good snowball (to throw at a fence), to build a strong sledding ramp (a really, really small one), and to work together to build a good, ole-fashioned snowman (or Snow Dude, according to Maddy and Owen). So that is what we did today, inspired by one of our favorite authors–Daniel Kirk and his Snow Dude and Snow Family books:

• Snow Dude Building: We built, we built some more, and then we built even more. We ended up with two awesome Snow Dudes today, one in the front yard, and one in the back yard.

Although it seems like building snow guys isn’t learning, it is. I challenged Maddy and Owen to figure out a way to gather as much snow as they could, and they did. Maddy decided to pile snow on our sled then drag it over, and Owen ran to the garage for his huge yellow dump truck.

Children love to be able to complete a task on their own, even if it is as simple as figuring out how to move snow from one place to another. They did this several times until we had enough snow to build our dudes, then we hit the nearby hills to sled with our neighborhood pals! And that was our learning for today; we used our outside time as wisely as we could before it melted away. . .