An English Lesson in the Snow! Come with Me to Learn Some English Words and Phrases about Snow

Hi, Bob the Canadian here.

Welcome to this little English lesson about snow, ha ha!

We are in the middle of a little snowstorm here

in Ontario, Canada,

and I thought this would be a great time

to do a little English lesson for you about snow.

(bright music)

Well, hey, welcome to this little English lesson about snow.

We're getting lots of it right now.

I'm Bob the Canadian.

If you are new here,

don't forget to click that red subscribe button below

and give me a thumbs up at some point during this video

if it's helping you learn English.

Well, we certainly have seen a little bit more snow

than we normally do at this time of year,

so I thought this is a great time

to do a little English lesson on snow.

We are not quite in the dead of winter.

That's the English phrase that means the middle of winter.

In fact, it's still fall here,

but we have just a little bit of a snowstorm.

It's kind of fun.

We're getting a lot of snow coming down,

and you can see in the background,

one of the ways we would describe this

is to say that there is a nice blanket of snow.

You can see the snow

is kind of like a white blanket on the ground.

So you might recognize this as the picnic table

that I used to do livestreams from,

and I wanted to use this

to demonstrate what we mean by accumulation.

We use the word accumulation

to talk about how much snow has fallen.

So if I take this ruler and I put it into the snow,

we already have four centimetres of snow.

That's actually not a lot.

We're expecting another 20

to 25 centimetres of snow tonight.

So right now, the total accumulation,

the total amount of snow, is four centimetres.

This is my daughter's jack-o'-lantern from Halloween.

It needs to go in the compost soon,

so if you're wondering what that is,

that's a pumpkin that we carved

and we put a little candle inside for Halloween.

So you'll notice I have my winter hat,

which we also call a toque, and I have my gloves on

because even though it's only -2 Celsius right now,

with the wind chill factor,

it feels like -7.

The wind chill factor

is kind of what the wind makes it feel like

when it's blowing in cold weather.

So even though it's only -2,

it feels like it's -7 out here.

It's actually not that cold yet for a Canadian.

I'm like, bring on the minus 20.

That's when I feel like it's really cold.

So if you live in a northern country where you have snow,

and you like to drive a vehicle, you will have a snow brush,

which will have a scraper at the end.

The snow brush is for brushing snow off of your vehicle,

and the scraper

is for scraping ice. (ice scratching)

You can hear the sound.

The scraper is for scraping ice off the vehicle as well.

So usually, we try to park our van inside,

but we actually have too much stuff in our garage right now.

So tomorrow morning,

I will have to brush the snow off of my van

so that I can go to work.

Oh, I need to turn around quick.

That is a snowplow going by.

I was hoping to be closer to the road.

The snowplow is cleaning the snow off the road,

and he is also putting down salt and sand

so that when we drive on the road,

we don't have to drive through snow.

And the salt melts the snow,

and the sand gives us more traction.

So that was a snowplow.

So you can maybe just see

that there a lot of snowflakes falling right now.

One of the things that I used to do as a kid

is you try to catch snowflakes on your tongue.

It's kind of fun when you look up

and you see all the snowflakes coming down

and you try to catch them.

So snowflakes are the small little flakes of snow

that fall out of the sky,

and there's certainly a lot of them falling right now.

So another thing we do in the winter

is we put snow tires on our vehicles.

This vehicle will be going in next week, actually,

to have its snow tires put on.

These are still the normal tires.

So right now, it's not very safe

for me to drive this vehicle in the snow.

So I think next Tuesday, this van is going to the garage,

and the mechanic will change the tires

and put snow tires on for me.

That'll make it drive a lot better in a snowstorm like this.

Probably shoulda done it last week.

So often when the weather gets bad,

they'll talk about the driving conditions,

and there's two parts to the driving conditions.

There's the road condition.

That's how much ice and slush and snow there is on the road,

and then there's the visibility.

Visibility is how far you can see through the snow.

So you'll notice right now

that we have really bad road conditions,

and we have pretty bad visibility as well.

It's hard to see really far in the distance

when you're driving.

One of the things that usually happens

when we have a snowstorm like this

is school gets canceled.

My kids are really hoping

that tomorrow will be a snow day.

A snow day in Canada

is a day when they decide to keep the schools closed

because it's dangerous to be out driving,

so they just decide it's better for the children

to stay home.

So my kids right now

are really hoping that tomorrow will be a snow day.

I'm kinda hoping it is too, actually,

'cause then I get to stay home from work. (laughs)

So one of my favorite things to do as a kid

when there was a snowstorm

was to go outside and make snowballs.

If you pack the snow, you can make a snowball out of it,

and then when we were kids, we would have snowball fights.

So you would throw snowballs at each other

on the playground or at the park,

and it was super, super fun.

So one of the things

that my kids and I love to do in the winter

is go sledding.

There's actually another video.

I'll put a link up here from last winter

where I went sledding with my kids,

and that is just a fun thing to do outside in the winter.

Another thing that people like to do in the winter

is to go snowmobiling,

but you would think with the size property I have,

I would have a snowmobile, but I don't.

So hopefully a lot of other people with snowmobiles go out

and really enjoy the day tomorrow

with this much snow, this early in the season.

So the last thing I'm going to do before I go inside

is to make a snow angel.

I'm not sure if you've ever seen one,

but kids in Canada often make snow angels,

and this is how you make them.

You lay on the ground, and you do this!

And when you get back up,

there's kinda the shape of an angel on the ground.

Can you see it?

Well, hey, that was a little lesson on snow,

and it was really fun to make this during the snowstorm.

I'm Bob the Canadian.

Thank you so much for watching this English lesson.

If it helped you a little bit, please give me a thumbs up,

and if you're new here,

don't forget to click that red subscribe button below.

And thanks so much for watching.

(bright music)