I’m not sure what the weather is like where you are, but in my neck of the woods it’s COLD and there is a thick blanket of the white stuff covering the ground. So, in keeping with what’s going on outside, here are some vocabulary-building snowman activities that you can do with your children/students.

Dress the snowman

Have the children work in partners. One child will be the snowman and the other will do the dressing. The snowman stands at one end of the yard and the bucket of clothing is placed at the other end. (We did this activity outside, but you could easily adapt it to be done inside as well with a little less running.) Yell “ready, set, chapeau!” The running child will run to the bucket of clothing, pull out a hat, say “chapeau” out loud, and then run back and put it on the snowman child, saying chapeau again while placing the hat. This process is repeated for each article of clothing to be placed on the snowman. The first team to get their snowman dressed wins the round. Then, the children switch places so everyone gets a chance to be the snowman and the runner.

Many thanks to one of our French Club moms for coming up with this fun activity! The children enjoyed themselves, reviewed vocabulary, and got the wiggles out before we settled in to read a story.

Books

There a ton of stories about snowmen available. We read Notre Bonhomme de Neige by Alice Schertle (from our local library). This book has simple and repetitive vocabulary with fantastic illustrations.

Other books that are sitting in my to-read pile for this week include these:

Music

This link for “Bonhomme, Bonhomme sais-tu jouer” (YouTube) is fun. It’s more music vocabulary and not so much winter/snowmen, but the lyrics are simple and repetitive. Warning: The song is a bit of an earworm – we were singing it around the house for a few days afterwards. 🙂

Dice game

Have the children draw and cut out different parts of a snowman (hat, sticks for arms, etc.). We used this template and had the kids colour it. Split the kids into groups of 2-3 and give each group 2 dice. There are a number of variants you can do depending on how advanced the kids’ number vocabulary is, but we did multiplication. After each child rolled the dice, they would say “six fois six égale trente-six” (or whatever they happened to roll). After saying the numbers out loud, they referred to this sheet that I made and printed and put that part of the snowman on to their paper.  Then they passed the dice to the next child. If they rolled a number combination and already had that part, they skipped their turn. The first child to dress their snowman won.

Marshmallow snowmen

Supplies needed per child: 3 marshmallows (body of snowman), one toothpick (to hold marshmallows together), a chocolate macaroon (hat), popeye sticks or pretzels (arms), chocolate chips or M&M’s for eyes and buttons, and a bit of icing to stick them on. You could also use thin licorice for a scarf, but we didn’t. There are a ton of crafty pictures of these on Pinterest, but ours were not nearly that fancy. The point was vocabulary building, so we kept it simple. The kids had to name what they were using and what part of the snowman it was going to be before they were allowed to use it.

I hope these activities help you to enjoy winter while it’s here and that spring comes to you soon!

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