‘Tis The Season

Oh…I’m SO lovin’ all these fun little Christmas activities! There’s just something about this time of year, don’tcha think?! I’ve gotten SO many WONDERFUL ideas from blogland that I can’t wait to implement in my own room! Y’all are too dang much! Here are a few more things we worked on this week…

I was so inspired by Sarah Cooley’s Noun Town that we made one of our own, too! Since it’s the holiday season, we decided to make a Gingerbread Noun Town. We did some “city planning” before we got started. We talked about people, places, and things that we might see in our town and brainstormed a list of each. After city planning, I had each of the kids choose a different building to create {gingerbread style} using the list of buildings from our brainstorm chart {forgot to take pics!!} I set out cotton balls, garage sale dots, construction paper, and other little materials for them to use. They had to label their buildings as well!

We had a candy shop & a dentist’s office right next to each other…an airport…a toy store {of course!}…and they were adamant about including a school! After we put our town together, I had the kids write a fiction story about their visit to Gingerbread Noun Town. I told them that they had to start with a “hook” and tell me why they visited and what they did when they got there. They LOVED it! And it was so fun to read their stories…SO creative! The kids illustrated their writing and then we assembled it into a Gingerbread house shaped book! They’re still working on this part, so they aren’t quite finished yet ;)

You should check out Babbling Abby if you haven’t already. She has some DARLING Gingerbread activities and downloads posted on her blog!!

Speaking of Gingerbread, the holiday season just wouldn’t be complete without some kind of peppermint or candy cane activity. I can take NO credit for this idea…one of the teachers on my team has been doing this for years! And I think it’s PRECIOUS! We’ve been learning about doubles math facts, so we gave the kids two small paper plates and had them create peppermints using the backside of the plates. In the white part of the peppermints, the kids wrote their own doubles facts. We stapled the plates together, put them inside a little food baggie, and gathered the edges & tied them with yarn. I hung mine on my window, but some of the other teachers hung them from their ceilings. SO fun!

Gingerbread & Christmas Stuff

Okay…still SO behind…but here are just a couple of things we’ve been working on!

We’re still going strong with fact families, so I had my kids make fact family gifts. They rolled dice to get the numbers to add together for the sum. I also had them roll the dice twice and add those numbers together to practice working with higher numbers. As you can see, they made their own bows…but real bows would have been a great “addition” too! ;)

Speaking of gifts, this is one of my most FAVORITE writing activities. I started doing this my third year of teaching and have been doing it ever since! I think it’s so precious and sweet and really gets the kids thinking about non-material gifts. I used to read the book, Crispin The Pig Who Had It All {I ADORE this book!!!}, but unless you have $189 to shell out on a new version of this story, GOOD LUCK finding it!! HA!!! This year I read this book…

For a little reader’s response, I had the kids write about the best gift of all…and it couldn’t be anything store bought! I love, love, LOVE reading their responses!! One of my little guys wrote, The best gift of all is my family and the LORD. Melt. my. heart.

{I cut a class set of red rectangles….don’t know the dimensions…for the gift boxes and pre-cut the white gift wrap as well. I cut a white piece of paper just a touch smaller than the red and told the kids to write their responses and draw their illustrations on that. Then the kids assembled everything else themselves, making sure that the gift box lifted up so that we could peek underneath and read their writing.}

We’ve been working on a few little Gingerbread activities as well, but this is all I have pictures of so far! We’re learning about long vowels and this week’s chunks were –ike, –ide, & –ine. I programmed a bunch of little gingerbread men with the chunk words, cut them out, and placed them on a little cookie sheet. I labeled three paper plates with the chunks and the kids got to use a spatula to move the Gingerbread from the baking sheet to the corresponding paper plate. They are LOVING this activity! They also had to record the chunk words on a recording sheet as they sorted.

You can download your copy of this fun little activity right HERE!!!! {I included a sheet of blank Gingerbread men so you could write your own words inside their bellies!}

Here are a few little Gingerbread activities you can download as well! Just click on the pictures for your copy!!

This could be used as a perimeter/estimation activity. I used buttons for it! I had the kids estimate the perimeter of each Gingerbread and then use buttons to make an accurate count. We also talked about factors that would have made our counts different {using big/small buttons, etc.} Click on the picture for your copy.