Welcome back to another week of the adventures of Snowflake, my classroom elf, and the happenings in our classroom.
Today we were all writing to Santa. He brought us a book, a mail basket and paper to use to write our letters. The kids loved using candy canes as little spacers. We listened to some Christmas music and wrote out our wish lists, after telling Santa a bit about ourselves and asking him some questions. As always the letters are priceless.
If you are looking for some quick and easy writing for this week check out this center or tuck it away for next year. It is perfect for the whole month of December!
We had another busy day filled with lots of holiday fun. We read one of my favourite Christmas books and one that is not very well known so no one had heard it before. It is called Santa's Secret Helper.
We read part way through and then they went off to draw what they would do if they were Santa's secret helper. They had some great ideas ranging from helping with the reindeer, working out in the workshop with the elves and even flying with Santa to help with deliveries. They were so happy and engaged because it was all about drawing since I planned the writing for tomorrow.
We have also just started our graphing unit and were making concrete graphs with our snowflakes. We used a ruler for our starting line and they figured out how they were going to create their graphs as a table team.
When we came to school on Wednesday we could not find Snowflake anywhere but found this note instead. You should have seen their little faces. On the day previous one of the girls "almost" touched Snowflake. There was quite an uproar about this. They were really having a hard time with listening and following instructions too since the beginning of the week. This was the perfect opportunity to try to reign them back in.
Santa wrote us a letter telling us that Snowflake was staying at the North Pole for the day but he would be watching very closely to see if everyone was doing a better job of listening and following instructions. Well let me tell you, this letter worked it's magic. Everyone was far better behaved knowing that Snowflake's return was riding on their behaviour.
We started our day working on letters to Snowflake since we could not write about him in our elf journals. Everyone told him they missed him and that they would try harder to be better listeners. I love the art work on the back of this letter!
It was also Gingerbread day so a little stuffed gingerbread man hung out with us for the day instead. We read a classic version and talked about the character of the Gingerbread Man. We have been talking a lot about what characters are like on the outside (appearance) and inside (character traits). We brainstormed different character traits of the Gingerbread Man over the course of the story and noticed how his character changed. Most kids thought he was very smart or clever in the beginning but near the end they were thinking of words like worried or nervous when he was riding on the fox's back. They completed a writing activity to tell about one of the character traits and they had to back it up with evidence from the story. You can get this freebie {HERE} or by clicking on the picture.
Next we made our own Gingerbread man/girl ornaments with lots of stick on gems and things from the Dollar Store. The yummiest part was tasting gingerbread and graphing whether we liked it or not. Everyone loved it! Now I know what kind of cookies to make for next week. :)
Today was all about reindeer! We made our reindeer paintings for the parents and read about reindeer. I had a lot more planned but our Christmas concert prep is taking a lot of time so we didn't get as much done as I would like. There are the reindeer in progress and the finished framed gifts.
It's Friday! Finally....it has been a long week. Today was our Jingle Bell Parade. We collect food for our local food banks and the whole school participated in a Jingle Bell Parade throughout our community. We were supposed to dress up as Candy Canes - not sure how exactly we would have done that - so we all had giant candy canes I found at the Dollar Store - what would teachers do without the Dollar Store?
Snowflake wanted in on the fun today so so he came dressed in a Christmas sweater and brought us candy canes - he hung them all over our Christmas tree. I carried him during the parade. All my previous students got very excited when they saw him. He caused quite a stir!
It was been a busy week but the busiest is yet to come. Next week we have Grinch Day, our Christmas concert, Polar Express and not to mention all of the other things that go on.
Do you have an elf that you are blogging about? Link up and tell me all about your elf.
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