Ho! Ho! Ho! There's till no snow (part 2)

Well, I don't know about all of you, but the last week has been crazy!  We had full days of school through Dec. 22!  The excitement of Christmas, coupled with the flu, led to quite an eventful (and messy!) last day of school!  At least the temperature is in the MID-40's! making recess duty (and now cleaning my garage) not as unbearable as it could be!

Last time I shared some of my math related holiday activities. This time I will follow up with some literacy (and whatever I forgot before!) activities! Hope you enjoy (and get some ideas for next year!).

Literacy Centers

I called this "candy cane words".  The kids use paper candy cane pieces to spell names and sight words.  It's really interesting to see how they form some of the trickier letters out of the random pieces.  To make the pieces, I just printed red/white striped paper (pick up your copy HERE) and either cut different length strips for the "straight pieces" and then cut out several "o"'s using the die cut machine which I chopped into various portions to create curved pieces.

After the kids made a word, they had to record it on the recoding sheet.

At another center I the kids had a bag full of sight words, along with some Christmas Pictures (I think I got these from Victoria Smith at kinderkorner.com) and they had to use the words and pictures to make sentences.  My rule was that all the sentences could NOT follow the same pattern (I like, I like, etc.)

One of their favorite activities every year is going "shopping" for Christmas presents.  I print out small booklets that have a present with a letter in it on each page.  (Get yours HERE). I am lucky enough to have a copier that shrinks and creates booklets from regular sized sheets of paper!  If you don't, and don't want to print 26 sheets per kid, here is a condensed version.  Anyways, the kids look through toy catalogs and sale papers, and cut out "presents" and glue them on the correct page, based on what letter they start with.

I found a Christmas tree glyph from Shari Sloane's site that I modified and turned into an art center project.  We sponge painted the trees, and then used a scrap-booking circle punch to cut out the ornaments.  I was amazed at what a fine motor activity the hole punching turned into!

We made our own "Rudolph Rudolph" books (I got this idea from little giraffes) and the kids just loved how Rudolph's nose kept changing color, it rhymed, and had lots of sight words in it!  You can get your own copy here.  I imported mine into a Promethean board flip chart so we could ALL see and do word work together as well.  (Have I ever mentioned how much I LOVE my promethean board??)

We also made TLC type reindeer, which focuses on turning squares and rectangles into "art" while incorporating LOTS of math vocabulary (horizontal,  diagonal, center, etc).  I just love how every year there is that 1 reindeer facing the wrong way!

We made elves, along with an "Elf to do list" from an idea I got from Deanna Jump's website.  I just laugh when I look at how stressed out the one elf looks!  Kind of reminds me of myself around the holidays! :)

 

 Each month we make a "quilt" from different TLC type art activities.  This month's features the TLC Santa, and the Little Giraffe's Tree.  So Cute!

 Not to forget about Hannukkah, in order to try to broaden the students culturally (I work in a very NON-diverse area) some of the things we did was watch an Elmo Hannukah clip  and learned how to play the dreidle game.  The kids LOVED it.  Want a copy of the game, click HERE.  Not sure where I originally got the dreidles from... my ex-husaband is Jewish!

And... just because I love when kids surprise you...  We had pretzels for snack one day, and 1 of my students decided to eat them in the shape of the alphabet!  I you look carefully, and use a little imagination, you can actually make out each letter!

Well, I hope to get some school stuff done over break (like lesson plans for next week!) but also want to find some time to relax as well. Hope your holidays are enjoyable, relaxing and refreshing! 

Ho! Ho! Ho! There's still no snow!

It's officially the middle December is Wisconsin, and we still have not had any snow (other than the 5 minutes during writing time last week that inspired many young writers and caused quite the commotion!)  Nevertheless, we are continuing on with our Christmas activities!  Maybe by January when we do the bulk of our Winter unit there will be some on the ground to reference!  Anyways, here are some of the fun thing in math we have been doing this week!

Math Station Activities

Ornament Color: students use 3 different colored unifix cubes and see if they can find all the different ways to line them up.  There are 6 ways total.  I am always amazed at how well the kids do with this activity!  I have them re-order their cubes and put it next to each ornament to see if it is the "same" or if they found a "new way".  For more of a challenge, I give kids 4 unifix cubes and see how many of the 24 ways they can find!  (I just put four of theses sheets on 1 piece of paper, and have them color the hook as the 4th spot on the ornament.)

You can pick up a copy of this HERE

Christmas Pattern Block Pictures: I originally had a pattern block present activity that I had gotten out of the Mailbox magazine years ago, but since I "misplaced" about half of my Christmas file, it is missing so this is what I had to create for a similar activity. Can you spot the errors in this student's work? 

HERE's a copy to save you the trouble of re-creating it should you misplace your file :)

Help Santa Grow his Beard: To practice the concepts of adding and subtracting, we play this fun Santa game.  Students roll the +/- dice and add/subtract that many cotton balls from Santa's beard.  To help work on sharing and playing fairly/correctly, I have each student use their own Santa board, but they are to share the die.

Santa's Sleigh Drop: I really like how this activity is worded, color coded, and the concept, and the kids did MUCH better than I thought they would!  They put presents in Santa's sleigh (which just happens to be a 10 frame) and then - oh no!- Santa's drops some and they have to figure out how many are left!  I used erasers as "presents" because they fit in the squares so nicely!  I can't take credit for this activity at all though - I got it HERE for FREE!

Tannenbaum tallies: I got this from Deanna Jumps' and Julie Lee's Winter Packet and the kids ROCKED the tally marks!  I was so impressed that they remember that "number 5 goes across them all" and to leave spaces between their groups of 5!  Yeah!

Present Patterns: For some reason my class LOVES to color this year, so I have been letting them color patterns.  I have a sheet like this for just about every season/month, and the patterns get harder as we go along.  Here we are coloring and labeling a pattern.  I always include a "make your own" pattern on the back to see who truly understands the concept of creating a pattern that repeats..."no.... red, blue, yellow, blue, green,  is not a pattern...."  :)

Finally, I stumbled upon a new blog http://livelaughlovek.blogspot.com/ and got a few new centers from there as well!  We will be doing those next week (yes, we have school until the 23rd!) so I will post those, along with some of our literacy centers next week.