Good news!  After an unseasonably warm Christmas and New Year with no snow in sight, we finally got some great snow last week.  So my sad view of bare trees and paper snowflakes changed to this:

Isn't that beautiful?  And the next good thing is that we got enough snow over the course of a few days we got enough snow to make the sledding great.  So last Sunday after church and lunch, everyone bundled up and headed for the sledding hill. 

Even Emma (15 months old) enjoyed going down the hill a few times on our laps.  But she enjoyed being pulled in her own little inflatable sled even more.   

We've enjoyed the snow immensely and have even spent some time studying snow in our homeschool.  Miles and Grace Anne recently completed their lapbook projects based on Katy and the Big Snow by Virginia Lee Burton.  We used the Katy's Big Snow units from Hands of a Child for our study and having the prepared graphics and activities made my job so much easier!  See what a great job they did:

Grace Anne's Katy Lapbook

And here is the one Miles did: 

I love using good literature to tie their learning together and make it relevant and the Hands of a Child unit made that so easy for me.  We studied the various elements of the literature, but then we went further to do a study of the compass, how it is made, how it is used.  We took the various businesses/institutions mentioned in the story and classified them as government or private institutions.  This led to some great conversations and learning opportunities.  We learned about blizzards--what is required to classify as storm as a blizzard?  We looked at famous blizzards in history.  This was cool because we had just experienced a blizzard on December 1.  We looked at snow plows (which are pretty easy to find around here) and other heavy equipment and even designed our own piece of heavy equipment that serves duel purposes.  We had a great time with this unit and look forward to our next one.

If you have been meaning to try lapbooking, I encourage you to visit Hands of a Child to see what they have to offer.  They always have a freebie unit available for you to try to see what you think.  Katie from Hands of a Child has written a series of articles for the Homeschoolblogger Front Porch explaining more about lapbooking.  You might want to check them out too!

Have a blessed day and do something fun with your kids!