Holiday Tag Freebies!

Ohh last week before winter break...how incredibly crazy you are! This week I have been working to get together and distribute staff, volunteer, and student gifts. 

I will grace you with some photos of my student gifts once I deliver them to them on Friday...but I thought I would share some of the quick and easy items I have put together for my staff and volunteers now and some freebie tags I stuck on em all!

First, I stuck these cute little puppies in each of my colleagues mailboxes. 

Cheap, easy, and cute, I think! Just a York Peppermint Patty and this happy little tag. I have seen this phrase a variety of places used with mints before, and just added my own little twist specific to teachers. You can grab a copy of these tags by clicking here. 

Font compliments of Hello Literacy.

I also baked up some cookies for my parent volunteers. This is another cheap way for me to provide something yummy and say thank you as my family bakes mountains of cookies each year anyway!

To grab a copy of the "Thank you for helping us to be "smart cookies"!" tag from me (I pulled off my name and Spanish section to make it a little more user friendly for all), go ahead and click here.

Graphics and fonts by Ashley Hughes and dafont.com.

Silence for Sandy Hook Elementary

Winter Characters!

This week we have been focusing on character traits like it is nobody's business! To make it a little more relevant and exciting we have been tying it in with some good ole' winter reads! Here are the three titles we focused on this week:

We started the week with !Me gusta el invierno! After reading, we worked together as a class to brainstorm words to describe our furry, red friend. Here are some that the kiddos came up with:

We took the trait writing a step further the next day after reading the text "El Mitón" by Jan Brett. 

I put the students into groups of two and three and gave them a large notecard with a character name on the back. They had to work in their small group to draw a picture of the character and describe it in a sentence with at least two descriptive words similar to how we would introduce characters in an effective story summary. 

Here are some of their examples:

"The Mitten" is about a large, brown bear.

"The Mitten" is about a boy named Nicki that lost his mitten.

And our finished "mitten" with all of our characters and their descriptions...

Then this morning, we bridged our learning into English and read the classic "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" by Dr. Seuss.

After reading, the kids worked in small groups to select character traits that described the three main characters in the story. To add a little Christmas pizzaz to the activity, we created "character wreathes", by jotting down the traits on scraps of green paper and gluing them to a plate all around the character which was being described.

Here is one from a "Grinch" group:

And a few others who described his faithful dog and Miss Cindy Lou-Who:

I shall be hanging these tomorrow...gotta love free classroom decorations!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

December is one of my favorite months in my classroom. I love the holidays, the decorations, and the BREAK! ;). Each December we embark on a "Winter Celebrations Around the World" unit, which is always just so much fun! 

At the beginning of last week, I introduced my students to the unit by giving them the opportunity to share some of their winter traditions and memories. Each child wrote down a favorite winter past time on a post-it, then we sat in a circle and shared them as a class. We then created the following anchor chart to display our ideas.

Their homework that night was then to go home and select a photo (or I gave some of my kiddos paper to create a drawing if they shared with me that they did not have one) which portayed them either participating in this winter activity and/or another that they enjoyed during this season.

We shared these the next day as a class and the kids had the opportunity to ask questions about one another's photos. Then I create a border with all of our photos around our anchor chart to keep them on display throughout December. (Yes, it's on my door...I have to use any open space I can!)

After building our background knowledge and sharing our winter schema, we began taking a look at our first winter celebration- a familiar one for most of my kiddos- Christmas!

After reading a good ole' non-fiction text about the holiday and gaining some new knowledge, we set about participating in a acclaimed Christmas tradition- decorating the tree!

We took all of the students pictures next to the lit up (partially decorated tree) the day before. Then I printed them off, and had them glue them to their ornaments. I create the ornament with some simple glitter filled cardstock, and a ribbon and cut them out with my Cricut in no time. On the back, all of the students added "Merry Christmas, their name, and the year". It seriously took about 5 minutes, but gave them that experience of decorating the tree...and gave our tree a definite lift that it needed! Here is the finished product:

Finally to conclude our week, we discussed how during this holiday season, many take the time to give back to their communities and others who may not be as fortunate. We worked to brainstorm a variety of ways that we as superkids could work to exude this "giving spirit" and then the kiddos each created a light to add to our newest bulletin board entitled "The Superkids Can Light up the World!".  I got this original idea from Fun in First Grade. Click on the blog title to see Jodi's inspiring example!

Here are some examples of their ideas for how they could make the world a brighter place this winter season:

And here they are as a collective unit...

The kiddos were quite excited to share their ideas for giving back with their parents and I encouraged them to work to do some of them over their winter breaks to give back!

This week we are focusing on Hannukkah and Kwanzaa....photos to come later :)!

Thanksgiving has come and gone...

...and I am finally posting about it! Gosh I am behind! I swear we actually did these activities before Thanksgiving...I am just finally getting around to sharing them (maybe put them in your save bank for next year! ;))

We started off last week by reading "Turkey Trouble" by Wendy Silvano. Then we created some fab "turkeys in disguise". You can get the template for this activity by clicking here. Thank you for sharing Tori!

I know this is a project that most send home for students to work on with their families. However, as many of my students do not have the resources to complete them at home, I always do them in class. I ask them to bring little items if they can contribute and then I bust out my craft supplies! It is quite hilarious to see what the students come up with on their own anyway! Here are a few samplings:

A "fireman"

A "gift" and a "poodle"

Yea...see those beans along side the poodle...are you thinking the same as I was. The poodle did her business....you would be incorrect. I was informed that they are eggs lol...apparently we need to review the whole mammal thing!

A "rainbow and a "dinosaur"

Also please note the "Nemo" at the bottom of the page. When I asked this student why he was adding a fish he informed me because his face looks frightened and dinosaurs are scary. The things kids think of!

We also did an activity in Spanish last week to reflect on what we are thankful for. I only had time to snag one photo as we were scrambling to get it done at the end of the day....but he is our "Doy gracias..." mobile we created as a decoration for our homes!

If you would like a copy of the template for this (for next year...or if you get in the "thankful" spirit at another point throughout the year) you can grab it by clicking on the templates below. I just precut and hole punched the construction paper for my students to glue their work to in creating the mobile! This saved some serious time!

We also took the opportunity to make some comparisons between past and present last week. Here is a quick venn diagram we created as a class after reading the book "If You Lived in Colonial Times..." While reading, I gave the kiddos post-its, one labeled S for Same and one D for Different and as I read I asked them to jot down anything they heard in the text that was the similar or different to our present day lives. Here are some of the things they came up with:

We are finishing up past and present this week before embarking on our "Celebrations Around the World" unit the first week of December!

What time is it? Freebie

I found this latest math activity on Pinterest and thought it was just too perfect for our review of telling time to the hour/half hour. Here is the link to the original at Red Ted Art's Blog if you would like to check it out as well.

In the original activity, the students just cut circles and drew their own clock faces. To save some time on my end, I stamped a clock face on to a notecard. Then I wrote a specific time to the hour or half hour on the back of the notecard and each student was responsible for drawing the hands to represent the time on the back of their card onto the face of their clock. Once this was finished, we stapled the clock face to a strip of paper for a watch band. And voila...!

Once finished making our watches, I shared with the students that they would be walking around the room and asking their peers "¿Qué hora es/ What time is it?". Once asked, the classmate instead of telling them the time will simply quietly show them their watch face so that they can read the time. The students then record the time that they read next to the corresponding classmates name on the "What time is it?" recording sheet.

Here are some of my kiddos participating in the activity. They were so engaged. It was a great way to practice telling time vocabulary!

You can grab a copy of the Powerpoint to create your own "¿Qué hora es?/What time is it?" recording sheet by clicking the image below. By adding text boxes you can add your students' names to the 1st, 3rd, and 5th columns. Then your students will fill in the time next to each peer's name in the correponding space in the 2nd, 4th, and 6th columns. 

Graphics and Fonts by Creative Clips, The 3am Teacher, and Kevin & Amanda.

Once the students had sufficient time to walk around the room finding the time, we came back together as a class, and I called on each student to share the actual time on their watch to check our work. They did a great job with it, and it made for an authentic learning experience with telling time!

Super Citizens

This past week we have been focusing on how to be good citizens! 

After learning what a citizen is, we worked to come up ideas relaying things we could do to be good citizens of our communities! 

Yes, yes....I made a boo boo and used a sentence strip to cover it up rather than re-do the whole poster! You can barely tell right?!

Here are some examples of what my kiddos wrote on their post-its:

The next day we put our ideas into action. I shared with the kiddos that not only were we going to learn about being good citizens, we ARE going to be good citizens!

We went about writing these letters to the our parents sharing our plans. 

We discussed how one way to be a good citizen is by giving back to others in our community. Thus, we started collecting cans...and after just two days...here is where we are...

I think I am going to need another container! We will be collecting them until Thanksgiving break when I shared with my students that I will be bringing them to the pantry. Each morning we add tally marks representing the cans we bring it....good tie in to math too!

This week we also learned about what a law is and how good citizens follow the laws of their community!

We then created this class book reflecting laws that we follow in our community each day!

"The Superkids Always Follow Laws"

Here are a few pages that were created:

Okay all...use your picture clues...what do you think this law is?

(If you guessed putting on your seatbelt, you are correct!)

And of course....we should not steal from houses or stores!

We will be continuing our government unit this coming week, so I'll share more as we get to it!

Happy Veteran's Day!