FIAR: Katy and the Big Snow, Part Two

Welcome back to the rundown of activities for Katy and the Big Snow. Part Two will go through art, math, and science. If you are looking for social studies, history, language arts, and geography, check out the Part One post.

Art: Use of Color – We discussed how the illustrations were done and the use of color in them. The minimal pallet choices is interesting and it makes for some very unique illustrations. We really enjoyed looking at that and how to emphasize things with that limited use of color. Especially in a picture such as the one where Katy is surrounded by the snow and there are no words on the page.

Art: Use of Space – We have been talking about the use of space on a page, when to use it all up and when to not, how to decide, and all that. We studies many of the illustrations in regards to the use of space.

Art: Showing Action – We also studies illustrations to look at how they showed action, such as plowing, movement, and helping.

Art: Personification – As I mentioned earlier, we tied this into the literature/language arts discussion on personification. The illustrations do a very good job of showing the personality of Katy and how she changes throughout the action of the book.

Math: Counting and Grouping – One of the illustrations is a wonderful way to show horse power. We used this with the suggestion from the book to talk about grouping. We then pulled a group of fifty-five items and showed different ways to group them. We specifically grouped by fives and practiced counting by fives. We also reviewed tally marks to make 55.

Math: Grouping – We picked something in the book to count and then looked at different ways to get to that number. For example, if we found 8 of something, we wrote out 5+3=8, 4+4=8. 2+2+4=8, etc. We did this with several different numbers.

Math: Statistics and Operations Research – We are always looking for extremely practical ways to show the use of math in the real world. This book was the perfect opportunity. When talking about city governments and the types of things needed to run a city, the girls talked about how many police officers and firefighters and city might need. Well, this is where math comes in and we talked about how they come up with those numbers. I introduced them to statistics and then had their dad talk to them about operations research. These are where mathematicians use research and number to predict something like how many officers are needed in a city of a given size. Or how many lift stations the water department will need in five years. Or how many electrical poles will be needed and how to decide where to put them. It was an interesting discussion and the girls really found out a lot about how math can make a great difference in our lives on a daily basis.

Science: Snow – We discussed seasons and winter in particular. We looked at some books on snow and different states of matter. We also talked about the various conditions that snow occurs under and what a blizzard is. Weather is always fun!

Science: Weather – We visited our local museum which is currently hosting a special exhibit entitled The Magic School Bus Kicks Up A Storm. We learned a lot about weather and how different kinds of weather form due to the current climate conditions.

Science: Snow Crystals – We painted a solution on black paper that dried in such a way that we could watch the crystals forming. Check out more on that project by visiting this post about it.

Science/Writing: Ice – We did a fun activity that I titled Listen and Write. It was a writing activity based on sounds they hear. After we completed the writing activity, we searched for more videos about ice and watched some really fun ones about various types of ice and its formation.

Well, I think that concludes the activities that we did to go along with Katy and the Big Snow by Viriginia Lee Burton. It was certainly a fun study. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did. At Home.

Tagged: art, FIAR, math, science