Winter Wednesday Outdoor Hour Challenge - Snow

I know it's not Wednesday, but with illness in our house, I'm a bit behind with this study. Enjoy!

We are using the Winter Wednesday Notebook Pages and Activity Ideas from Barbara over at her blog called Handbook of Nature Study. This is my second post from the Challenge. 

 With temperatures in the -30's Celcius (with wind chill) and more and more snow accumulating, this study was an easy one to get into. Everything is covered in the stuff. Frost and ice cover the insides of every window (We need a scraper for the inside of our van! LOL!). The trees are covered in snow and frost. The above picture shows pine needles covered in ice crystals.

I know these pictures are not very nature like, but just so you have an idea of the snow we are getting. This van was cleaned off a week before this picture.

This condo parking area has been getting cleaned up and the snow has been shipped out a few times but they just can't keep up. This is a car that hasn't moved in a while.

It's interesting to see how the snow piles up on each branch of this tree that is situated right outside our window.

When temperatures are so low it can become painful quickly on any exposed skin and breathing becomes difficult (it hurts to breath). It was a great time to take what was outside and bring it indoors to experiment with. We didn't follow the instructions very strictly. Instead of waiting for snow I gathered some of it in a container and gave it to Zoe while Ausytn was busy with something else. She started to play.

Austyn soon became interested and began to give her ideas of what to do with the snow.

I then got him some snow as well and they both went too work playing with snow, cold water, and warm water.

 Zoe enjoyed colouring and cutting out the snowflake printout provided.

We collected some snow in a measuring cup and melted it. It started at about 2 cups of snow.

It melted down to 1/2 cup of water.

You could see the fragments of dirt and dust in the bottom of the cup. We filtered it and here is what our filter looked like.

Ironically I found a book at the library that went well with this study. It's called Snowflake Bentley by Jaqueline Briggs Martin. It's about a man who grew up in the early 1900's in the United States and studied snow flakes. He was homeschooled up until the age of 14 and learned how to take pictures of snow flakes before they melted to show other people. He discovered that no two snow flakes are the same. He learned how they form and why they are always different. Talk about the perfect book for this nature study to incorporate some history.

I decided to get The Curiosity Club Kids' Nature Activity Book by Allene Roberts out again and start the section on weather. We have read the first few paragraphs.

A couple of days later the temperature was more tolerable and the kids went outside to play.