"The Snowy Day" by Ezra Jack Keats

Last week in 1st grade music, we had a lot of fun reading the Caldecott medal winning book "The Snowy Day" by Ezra Jack Keats. Written in 1962, this story follows a day in the life of Peter, a young boy who ventures out into the snow in New York City. When Keats decided to write "The Snowy Day" he wanted to feature minority children in New York City as the main characters, since at that time, that was something that had not been done. Written in the height of the civil rights movement, to this day "The Snowy Day" is loved not only for it's beautiful illustrations and gentle story, but for helping to break down racial barriers. 

Throughout the story, we added songs, chants and other musical activities that went along with what was happening in the book. We sang a song as we pretended to get dressed to go out into the snow with Peter, we did a chant about snowflakes where students moved like snowflakes while improvising their own duple meter rhythms, we did some vocal exploration while Peter was climbing up and sliding down the hill, and even had our own "snowball fight" while singing tonal patterns. "The Snowy Day" has become a favorite in our music room and we had a great time acting out the story!

To project the book on my large projector screen, I found a great resource online called We Give Books which is a free online collection of children's books. If you go to the website....www.wegivebooks.org you can sign-up for free and then you will have access to over 150 classic children's books! 

Here is the link for "The Snowy Day" that we read in class. http://www.wegivebooks.org/books/the-snowy-day