Winter Books For Kids: 2 of our Favorite Winter Books and a Few Ideas to Help You Enjoy Them

Reading is a great family activity that can and should be enjoyed year round. However, winter provides a lot of inside time; time that families can use to enjoy winter books and activities that will build strong family memories, help kids be better learners, and turn "boring" days into "fun" ones! Here are some of our very favorite winter books and a few of the activities we enjoy doing after we read them. Happy Reading! (These ideas can easily be adapted for classroom use.)

The Missing Mitten Mystery by Steven Kellogg is a delightful story. I'm still not sure if the text or the illustrations are my favorite, but we enjoyed both many times over. After we read it we:

1. Played " Missing Mitten ": The story just begs to have readers create a mitten hunt of their own. We took turns hiding a mitten, the only rules were you had to hide it somewhere we had been that day. It could be in the bathroom where we brushed teeth, at the table where we ate, in the toy bucket where the baby played....you get the idea. Those not hiding, had to stay in one room with the door shut until the hider returned. Once the mitten was hidden we searched and searched until it was found. Play as many times as you like and feel free to add your own variations like (the mitten has to be hidden by something that matches it's color or a pair of mittens are lost and must be found.) Have fun hunting and hiding together.

2. Made our Own Illustration: Again, I just loved the imignative illustration of this story. We decided to use our own mitten hunt as a spring board for making our own illustrations. After the hunting game was over I asked each girl to pick her favorite spot where she hid the mitten. Next she had to think of a creative thing the mitten could be doing in that spot. (In the bathroom it could turn into the baby's wash cloth...) Once they had a spot and a creative idea, they got busy drawing. We used oil pastels because they are fun and different and really vivid, but you could use any art supplies to make your pictures. We didn't put any words on ours, just let the pictures tell the story as some in the book do.

Stella Queen of the Snow by Marie Louise Gay is a new book for us this year. It was a delightful discovery! The language, fun, and sweet story mixed with the whimsical illustrations make it a great read from start to finish. We read it many times. A few pages in we realized it is full of similies, comparisons made using like or as, so we started keeping as list of those as we are studying similies in writing. This list lead to our first project:

1. Queen of the Snow Art: We decided to make our own poster using similies to describe snow. The girls wrote their name and "Queen of the Snow" at the top of the page. Then I typed a page like this "Snow: as ________________as ____________

____________________ like ________________

Snow _____________________________." The girls cut their page out and filled it in with words to complete their own snow similies. When the similies were done, we got to work decorating them. We used glitter, cotton balls and lace dollies from our craft closet to make them extra "snowy."

2. We Love Snow Challenge: We decided to try to do all the fun things Stella and Sam do, only we wanted to do them inside. The girls cleared the playroom floor and set out a towel for the frozen pond. They decided the rest of the floor was the snow. Then page by page, they followed Stella and Sam's snow journey, The snowman became couch cushions wrapped in a sheet, the fort a towel over the piano bench. Skating looked a lot like dancing on our towel of a pond! They used socks for snowballs and pushed each other around in the laundry basket for a sled. It did make a bit of a mess, but they had a ton of fun and got a lot of energy out. I loved that it followed the sequence of the story, required a bit of imagination and didn't cost anything.