Remember being a kid and watching as the TV scrolled through the lists of closures when the winter weather was blustery? If you’re anything like me you’d sit impatiently waiting to see your school’s name. Then it would cross the bottom of the screen and you’d get super excited. Throwing on your snow gear, you’d go out to enjoy the newly fallen flakes! Well, today’s students don’t have quite the same experience. These days snow days are e-learning and virtual learning days. That means as a teacher you must have something ready for those last minute at-home learning days. No worries – here are some virtual snow day activities that are easy to use and loved by students.

A New Type of Snow Day

As you know, the world of virtual learning exploded with the global pandemic in 2020. Now, instead of missing school for bad weather, virtual learning days are the new norm. While this is wonderful in terms of not having days to makeup, it does add a new level of planning to today’s teachers.

Since these bad weather days often sneak up on us, it is important to have some virtual snow day activities in your teacher toolbox. This will save your sanity and help your at home learning days to go off without added stress.

On virtual learning days, the name of the game is practice and review. Your students will be working with a new level of independence on these days. Using activities that they are already familiar with or skills they have already been taught will help them be successful. Choosing activities with a high level of engagement will help your students stay focused and working at home.

Here are some activities that you will want to add to your virtual snow day activities list. Your students will love them and they will save you time when the virtual learning day rolls around.

1. Build a Scene Interactive Digital Writing

If you want to get your students writing, this resource is one of my favorites. This interactive writing activity begins as student use the provided digital stickers to create their own scene. This is a fun way to get students engaged in and thinking about their story before writing even begins. By placing certain stickers in the picture area, your students are completing a prewriting or brainstorming activity. While they may not even realize what they are doing, they are beginning to form the story in their head.

From there, your students will use the picture they created to write a story. Depending on the grade level and ability of your students, their stories can range from a few words to a few paragraphs. See one of these interactive writing activities in action.

I love reading my students’ stories when they are complete. They are always very creative and their personalities shine through! This activity is highly engaging, so I always use it on my virtual learning days!

2. Would You Rather Winter Writing

Any time you ask kids to give their opinion, you have instant engagement. That’s what makes these Would You Rather writing prompts a hit with kids of all ages. And this excitement is just what you need for a virtual snow day.

These Would You Rather Winter themed writing prompts come in both print and digital formats. When using the digital option on a virtual snow day, you simply need to assign the writing prompt to your students. With options like ‘Would you rather build a snowman or a snow fort?’ and ‘Would you rather have a polar bear or a penguin for a pet?’ you are sure to have them writing in no time.

To help your students practice good writing, even when you’re not there to help them, each page includes a checklist. These little check boxes are there to give your students a friendly reminder to take a look at their writing and check for errors. Students will self-check that they are using complete sentences, capitals & punctuation, providing reasons to support the opinion, and that the writing makes sense.

My students LOVE completing these both in the classroom and online. One of my favorite things to do with them is, upon returning from a snow day, have my students revisit their writing and take it through the whole writing process. This gives my students a fun way to practice working through the writing process on a familiar topic that they have already begun to work through.

3. Digital Mystery Pictures: Math Fact Virtual Snow Day Activities

One of my favorite ways to practice math facts in the classroom and virtually is to use mystery pictures. These mystery pictures are all digital so you can use them in class with devices or in virtual learning scenarios like snow days. These mystery pictures cover all four operations and offer a fun way for students to practice fluently adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing.

To use, your students will open a copy of the document, answer, and reveal a mystery picture. The best part is all of the answers are self-correcting! Saving you a TON of time and allowing your students to get immediate feedback. This is especially important when in a virtual setting. Take a peek at one of these digital mystery pictures.

I like to use these each week and my students always play a game to see who can figure out what the mystery picture is first. This puts a little friendly competition into a fun fluency activity. This will be hard to do in a virtual setting, but wait until your students come back after the snow day! They will be so excited to tell you how long it took them to figure it out!

4. Digital Sight Word Practice

For those of you teaching in the primary grades, here’s a fun digital sight word activity designed just for them. Using a simple drag and drop activities, students will work on reading and spelling their sign words. Take a peek at what students will do with these digital sight word activities.

While this resource provides learning opportunities, it also acts as a way to differentiate in the online space. Simply assign different activities to your students based on their skill and ability level. The Digital Sight Word Practice Bundle includes 220 words from the Dolch sight word list.

How to Share Virtual Snow Day Activities with Students

Assign with Google Classroom

There are a couple of ways you can share these resources with your students. If you use Google Classroom, you’ll need to create an assignment with the digital resource you’d like them to complete. They will get a copy of the original and can complete the activity and submit it to you for grading.

Share a Link with Your Students

If you don’t use Google Classroom, copy the URL of the resource you’d like to share. Then, edit the URL by appending “/copy” to the end of the link. Be sure to put the “/copy” after the last forward slash in the URL. This will create a force copy link, making students create a copy of the activity so they each have their own file to work in. Then you will share the modified URL with your students via email, your learning management system, or another communication tool. Students will just click on the link to begin working.

Save this Virtual Snow Day Activities Post for Later

Save these ideas to your favorite classroom Pinterest board so that you will have them when you are planning your virtual learning day.