Making 3D snowflakes

[simplypanda]

Hey All,

Now that Thanksgiving is over, Christmas season has begun! I thought it might be good to bump this topic because many people seemed to like this lesson last year. Maybe some new teachers will find it helpful this year.

Because I did this lesson with every grade last year, I'm struggling to find a new, inexpensive Christmas/Winter craft project to do with my students this year. eek!

[juliana.ip]

Thank you so so much for this! I did this with both middle school and high school. They loved it.

I turned it into a communicative task like so:

1. Lead into Christmas theme.
2. Show completed snowflake. Brainstorm words that would be needed to make snowflake (fold, cut, tape, scissors, turn over, corner) Write onto board.
3. Pairs sit face to face, so that one person has their back to me.
4. Person facing me is the instructor. They watch what I'm doing and tell their partner what to do. No hand gestures, English only. Person with back to me has to listen to partner and make the individual snowdrop. Teacher just silently demonstrates at the front of the class.
5. When class has completed, get them to staple each other's snowdrops to make it into one big snowflake.
6. Hang it up in the classroom!

Note: Make sure you have enough tape, scissors and staplers to go around!!

My high schoolers continued to make more, and experimented with pinking scissors and larger numbers of snowdrops per snowflake.

Once again, thank you!

[ehmaeearwhy]

Thank you so so much for this! I did this with both middle school and high school. They loved it.

I turned it into a communicative task like so:

1. Lead into Christmas theme.
2. Show completed snowflake. Brainstorm words that would be needed to make snowflake (fold, cut, tape, scissors, turn over, corner) Write onto board.
3. Pairs sit face to face, so that one person has their back to me.
4. Person facing me is the instructor. They watch what I'm doing and tell their partner what to do. No hand gestures, English only. Person with back to me has to listen to partner and make the individual snowdrop. Teacher just silently demonstrates at the front of the class.
5. When class has completed, get them to staple each other's snowdrops to make it into one big snowflake.
6. Hang it up in the classroom!

Note: Make sure you have enough tape, scissors and staplers to go around!!

My high schoolers continued to make more, and experimented with pinking scissors and larger numbers of snowdrops per snowflake.

Once again, thank you!

i love this idea.
and the making of it is simple enough.
can't wait to try it next week.  :)

[gjpteachers]

This is a great idea - I'll use this in the winter camp courses, thank you for posting.

[sambalina]

I taught this lesson five times last Thursday to all middle-school level and it was awesome.
We did craft vocab first, then everyone made a practice snowflake 'arm' using scrap paper and following me step by step, then I gave them good paper, and in groups of 3 made a complete flake. If there was time, they coloured them in, too.

It was an easy lesson to teach, and the students loved it! The way I taught it, it was a fairly useless English lesson, but a very good end of year fun lesson. You could definitely up the English learning by adapting the lesson plan (as other above have mentioned).

Very fun, successful, and now my classroom is pretty, too!

[rjesu007]

Thanks so much for sharing this lesson plan idea! I remember making these wonderful 3D snowflakes when I was a little kid back home in Canada but totally forgot about this in my winter camp idea. Well it's there now.

I modified few of the PPTs here and if you are interested here you go!