Looking for a fun, winter-themed way to help your students practice adding descriptive language to their paragraphs? This creative snowman-building activity blends hands-on fun with writing skills, making it the perfect addition to your classroom this season. Your students will love bringing their snowmen to life with vivid details and ‘beefy sentences’ that transform their writing into something truly special!

Start with Snowmen

The first step of this project is to create a snowman.  The kids had criteria that they had to follow when making their snowman. 

Each snowman needed to have…

1. The same number of snowballs as the number of letters in their first name
2. A scarf, hat, eyes, nose, mouth, arms, and buttons

The kids were encouraged to be as creative as they could with the required items.  Then, they had to write a descriptive paragraph about their snowman.

Time to Get Descriptive

Once their snowman was created, they were ready to describe it! 

Requirements…

1. Use adjectives to describe each of the parts of their snowman. 
2. Write their “sloppy copy”. 
3. Write their descriptive paragraph using complete sentences. 

Of course I modeled what a good and poor example would look like.  The poor example included sentences that were repetitive.  For example:  It has a red scarf.  It has brown arms.  It has four buttons. 

The good example included “beefy sentences/details.  For example:  My snowman has a long, red scarf.  He has brown arms that are short and stubby.  There are four colorful buttons that have two holes in each button.  My students really do well when provided with modeled examples. 

Edit and Revise

They weren't finished there!  When their “sloppy copies” were complete, we took another day to edit eachother's work.   They have been learning about reference sources so the dictionaries were used quite a bit to find the correct spellings of their peers' work. 

They were encouraged to write compliments on the top of their peers' writings.  With modeling, they were writing words such as “Great adjectives!”, “Wonderful complete sentences!”, and “Good use of punctuation marks!” 

Publish

After the peer editing process was complete, I took the paragraphs home with me to do some final editing.  The following day was used to type our descriptive paragraphs and have them hung in the hallway.  It was so fun to see other teachers and students reading their work and trying to guess which paragraph belonged to which snowman.  Who knew so much learning could be so much fun! 

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