In my “All things winter worksheet related” quest to raid more of Boggle’s World of their materials, I stumbled upon another gem of a worksheet. This one is like a structured brain storming activity that takes place on a theme of “Winter”. The idea is that you link snowflakes with related words. I increased the challenge for some of my upper level students by stating that all the words had to logically follow from their parent snowflake, and that their child snowflakes had to logically derive as a subset of their parent.

If you started at the center “Winter” and then wrote “Activities”, you could connect “Sports” as well as “Studying”. “Sports” would be then “Winter Sports”, so you’d put “Ice Skating” as a child. Then as a child of “Ice Skating”, you could have either tricks, or equipment for ice skating. Whatever. The idea was for students to link words and ideas together in a logical progression.

The challenge was that some ideas needed to be stretched to fit the dimensions of the board, and they had to flow from each other so that they didn’t choke each other off. It was interesting to watch someone try to fill up a distant corner with a web of ideas. Some of the more advanced students could snake a word chain around the entire half of the paper. No two papers were the same, and they were more like Rorschach tests than cohesive ideas as the words began to finger into smaller ideas and more specific vocabulary.

Seeing what words students would associate with each other, and how lines would collapse back to themes like “Food” or “Homework” would probably tell people what is on a student’s mind most of the time. This is a better activity for older students with a large vocabulary. Otherwise, students will get stuck with short stumps of ideas that don’t let them fill the page. It might be better to print this on a paper larger than A4 and let the students draw more snowflakes if they can continue with a set of ideas even farther.

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