Christmasy Things

Sorry for posting so late, but of course things were crazy last week! We mostly did Christmas-related activities all week.

We read Tacky's Christmas. I LOVE Tacky!!! We'll be doing a penguin unit in January when we come back to school, and the kids will get to really delve into all the Tacky books. We all will fall in love with him! After retelling the story with a Tree Map story map, we created our very own Tacky Trees. They were hilarious!

We also read The Grinch Who Stole Christmas and created our own little grinches. They turned out supercute! We talked about the true meaning of the holidays, and I was glad to see that we realized it's not all about presents! :)

Polar Express Day was a huge hit, as always. We read the story together and talked about how some people love stories so much that they make movies out of them. I know this is hard for the kiddos to realize sometimes, so I gave them lots of examples. We were amazed! :) To make connections to the movie and book, we created our own mixed media paintings using watercolors and scrapbook papers. I love the way they turned out!

I hope everyone has a wonderful winter break. I'll see you all back in January! :)

Elf Excitement, Part 3

Nutcracker was at it again!

Monday he was so excited for the Texans' win that he found our magnetic letters and wrote "Go Texans" on the board!!! He was very proud of our team for winning the AFC championship! I'm glad Nutcracker really likes coming to stay with us in Houston. :)

Tuesday we found Nutcracker sleeping in our yellow basket. He thought one of the boxes I had from a Christmas present was pretty and looked comfy so he snuggled in. I guess he was just too exhausted from working so hard with Santa to get ready for Christmas!

Wednesday we found Nutcracker in our Christmas tree! I wonder how he got all the way up there! We were worried about him getting too hot with the lights on, but he seemed to be fine. He must be feeling very festive.

He was very ready for Polar Express Day on Thursday. He had taken our train down from around the tree and put it on the floor! His gingerbread friends were back to play with him.

Friday we were sad to see Nutcracker go. I forgot to take a picture of him in all our day's excitement, but he wrote us a very sweet poem about how he'd miss us very much. He promised he'd be back next year though and that he'd watch us through the SantaCam until Christmas. We'll miss him!

I'm so glad that Nutcracker got to be a part of our classroom family. I hope he had fun. I know the kids loved seeing him each and every day.

Happy holidays!!!

Heavy Hearts

Words cannot truly express the sadness of the tragedy that we saw yesterday in Connecticut. My thoughts and prayers are with all of those families. This beautiful poem takes on a little bit more meaning today. Thanks to Erica Bohrer for sharing it.

Holiday Joy... And Sparkles!!!

There is no doubt about it... the holiday season is HERE! I should add that it's here, whether we're ready for it or not! :) I had to share these pictures because I can't contain how excited I am to see my beautiful classroom each time I walk inside. A wonderful mom (and aunt!) from our room came in on Friday and completely decorated the whole room with beautiful Christmas spirit. The kids and I are overjoyed. It adds such magic and sparkle. Everything will look gorgeous on Friday when we have our party. I can't wait.

Thank you to all the parents who support us each day. We definitely couldn't do this job without you. :)

Elf Excitement, Times 2!

I've been glad to see that Nutcracker is with us for another week!

Monday he brought some gingerbread friends to our class with him. They had a marshmallow snowball fight in our classroom! We wondered where he got the marshmallows from. Did Mrs. Claus let him have some as a snack? Did he buy them at the store? I wonder what he's up to at night when we're not looking.

Tuesday Nutcracker brought some elf coloring pages into our classroom! They were so tiny! Santa had given him the coloring pages, so he borrowed our crayons to start coloring. Some of our classmates have been bringing in some gifts for Nutcracker. Our class is so sweet. One of the girls brought in another elf named Cat to be friends with him so he wouldn't be lonely. We set up a little bed on our blue chair to hang out with him. Another girl brought in a Santa toy for him to play with! I'm sure Nutcracker is very glad to be in such a wonderful classroom with such nice friends!

Wednesday we found Nutcracker ziplining across our classroom! He was using his "magic string" again as one of our friends dubbed the rainbow yarn. I love it! We decided that he was making pretty good choices, so some of the kids decided he should start on purple every day. I think Nutcracker really liked it. I'm sure he gave Santa a good report about how sweet our friends have been!

Thursday Nutcracker discovered my new stocking from Mrs. Shull next door. She knows how much I love Texas things (especially boots!), so she'd given me the cutest boot stocking! We realized Nutcracker was probably so cold with this new winter weather so he needed somewhere warm to snuggle. The kids also noticed he had a prime viewpoint to see everyone so they had to be on their best behavior! :)

Friday Nutcracker was making snowflakes out of Q-tips! His note said that he had borrowed them from Mrs. Claus. Silly elf! He really must be missing the snow when he's down here in Texas.

I can't wait to see what Nutcracker will do next. I think he really loves being in our classroom!

Holidays Around the World

This week was been focused on studying holidays all around the world. We talked about how some people celebrate different holidays with their families because they are from different countries and have different religions. This is a great time to share our cultures with one another. It's so interesting to learn new things about each of our students and their families each year.

Monday, we learned about Hanukkah. Our class read The Count's Hanukkah Countdown which I had picked up at the book fair this year. Being a Sesame Street lover, I just couldn't resist! The kids loved the story. It taught about the history of the holiday as well as some of the celebrations people have. Then we researched the holiday on PebbleGo, too. We were happy that we had our background schema so we could understand PebbleGo more easily! After we were done, we created handprint menorahs. I found them on Dr. Jean's website. She is a fabulous resource for teachers! Then the students wrote down facts they had learned about Hanukkah.

We also learned about Kwanzaa this week. We researched the holiday on PebbleGo and learned quite a bit of good information! We used our new knowledge to write some sentences about the holiday, then we created a beautiful Kwanzaa quilt. Since the kids have already woven with Ms. Carney in art class, they had a pretty easy time. I was very impressed! Usually weaving is ridiculously difficult, but we powered through it and helped one another! I must say that I am extremely grateful to have a class full of helpers. They'd rather help each other finish projects than go to Free Daily 5. What a blessing!

We also learned about Christmas around the world, researching on PebbleGo once again! (It never gets old!!!) I told the students about how the tradition of wreaths started in England. We found England on a map and made connections to the Pilgrims and how that's where they came from! Very exciting. Then the students created wreath ornaments to take home and hang up on their trees, windows, or doors. These are absolutely beautiful!

Our class also traveled to Mexico to learn about how they celebrate Christmas there, too. We read The Legend of the Poinsettia and talked about Las Posadas. Then we created our own poinsettias by tracing our hands. We were very interested to learn that the red part of the plant is actually leaves!

Friday was all about Christmas in Germany. We read Cobweb Christmas and learned about the tradition of tinsel. This is a wonderful story about a little old woman who had a Christmas tree in her house. One Christmas Eve, Kriss Kringle lets the spiders back into her home to see her beautiful tree. When they're climbing around her tree, they leave cobwebs everywhere. Kriss Kringle turns the cobwebs into silver and gold tinsel. We learned that many German families even place spider ornaments on their trees! I also taught the kids about another German tradition of the pickle ornament. Parents hide one pickle ornament on their tree. Whichever child finds the ornament first will get an extra present from Kriss Kringle. We made our own pickle ornaments and are hoping Santa might leave us an extra gift! :)

We also made nutcrackers. I had seen this idea on Pinterest and loved it! Using toilet paper rolls and construction paper, we put together our nutcrackers after we read the story as a class. Since first grade won a popcorn party for bringing the most toys in for Toys for Tots (yay!) we also got to watch Carebears Nutcracker movie, too. We had a great Friday!

We were such busy bees this week! We also researched reindeer on PebbleGo and learned another name for them is caribou! We talked about adjectives and created Bubble Maps for candy canes after reading Gingerbread Mouse which is a very cute story about a little mouse who moves into a gingerbread house. We also created a couple class books and will be working on more next week, too!

I am very excited for next week. I can't wait for the holiday party and sing-along on Friday! :)

Gingerbread Week

The holiday season is in full-force! This week was all about gingerbread.

One day we read The Gingerbread Man and retold the story, focusing on using our sequencing words. The kids are doing a wonderful job of remember which sequencing words to use. All our practice has really paid off! We read another version of the story and talked about the differences between the tales and why they exist. We discussed folk tales and how stories used to be told by word, so people changed them over time.

We also read The Gingerbread Girl which is a cute story about the Gingerbread Boy's wiser sister. We did a Double Bubble as a whole group to discuss the similarities and differences between the two different stories.

We created gingerbread men in disguise during writing time, then the kiddos used Tree Maps to create sentences to tell about their gingerbread men. They're still doing a good job of using the Tree Map to createa  full sentence, starting with a capital and ending with a period. These disguises turned out to be pretty cute!

During math one day, we created a gingerbread glyph. The students used a sheet of paper to describe themselves, then they used the directions to create their very own gingerbread person! This is a great way to learn about each other and the different things we like, the differences in our families, etc. We had a good time discussing all the things that we had in common!

One day we learned about the moon phases and created a cute project to go with it. I'd seen it on Pinterest, but it originally came from here. The kids loved how it was "almost like magic!" to watch the moon change from phase to phase. We researched moon phases on PebbleGo and talked about how the moon is ALWAYS in the sky, we just don't always see it. We were pretty amazed by that fact. :)

For Social Studies, we have been studying fables. This ties into our studies about families and traditions. There were a lot of great fables on My Capstone Library, so we were able to listen to the stories online. Very fun! The helper even used the Airliner to go through the pages for me, so I could work on our Tree Map. :) We thought about each fable we read and the lesson that we learned. Our class discovered that many fables teach us the same lessons, so those lessons must be pretty important. We had a great time reading the stories and learning how to make good choices!

We had another fabulous week. Thank you SO much for all the parents who donated to Toys for Tots. We've been talking about giving to those less fortunate, so it was great to be able to tie that into our lessons. Can't wait to see everyone tomorrow!