When the Weather Outside is Frightful

Bearpaw and Beavertail aren’t characters from the latest wacky cartoon, but they soon might enter your kids’ vocabularies. Both are terms from snowshoeing, a sport rapidly gaining popularity as a teaching tool. 

Snowshoeing is safe, cheap, and easy enough for kindergartners to do, but burns twice as many calories as walking. Plus, students absolutely love it, says physical education teacher Mia Pangburn. In her northeast corner of Maine near the Canadian border, kids actually put the shoes on their lists for Santa. And, during the long winters, “it gets kids outside moving and decreases cabin fever,” she says.

But snowshoes can teach more than fitness.  In its standards-based curriculum, the nonprofit organization WinterKids. incorporates stamping and striding into science, math, and art lessons like “Winter Ecology-Animal Adaptations” and “Moving Mathematics.”

So let it snow, let it snow, let it snow....

—Nora Shalaway