Polar Express and More Christmas Fun

We had a busy last week getting ready for Christmas and celebrating the holiday, all while squeezing some fun learning in too!  Centers this week were all Christmas themed.  We matched stars on Christmas trees that had the same sight words.

 We made real and silly sentences about elves in the pocket chart.

We filled in Santa's beard by rolling teen numbers.

We did a few writing around the room activities and hunted for Christmas words.

We recorded sight words written on gingerbread boys and girls.

We used magnifying glasses to compare and contrast Chistmas pictures and recorded our findings on a Venn diagram.

And we practiced our letter and number fluency by playing a fun roll and read game with our finger puppet pointers.

In math, we worked on addition by rolling two dice, showing the action of the numbers on a Christmas math mat, and recording the number sentence.

We also played a game where we crossed out a number around the Christmas tree when we rolled it using two dice.

This week we discussed needs and wants.  I forgot to take pictures, but we made stockings and cut out pictures of things we needed to survive and things that we wanted and would just be nice to have.  The kids got pretty good at distinguishing between the two!  We also did a needs and wants writing center.

This week in writing, we used our five senses to observe a candy cane.  We listened to, touched, looked at, and smelled our candy canes.

And of course at the end, we tasted them!  Then we wrote about candy canes and what we thought about them.

We also watched a little summary of the Grinch and wrote down adjectives to describe him.

This week, a 5th grade class came and performed a Reader's Theater for our class.  They did the story, "Santa's New Suit," which we had read in class, so it was fun for the kids to watch.

Look what our classroom got this week!  (I know the moms who have been in to help with painting projects will appreciate this as much as I do)!  I was able to redeem all of the Box Tops we had collected and bought a drying rack for our classroom.  No more laying projects out all over the room and getting paint everywhere.  Keep sending in the Box Tops, they really do make a difference and add up!  :)

Thursday was the day we celebrated Christmas at school with our class.  Mr. Hansen invited us down to the office to listen to a couple of Christmas stories and get a candy cane.

Then it was time for the Polar Express!  I have to apologize, I was so busy doing things that I didn't have the chance to take a lot of pictures. 

I decorated the room with train tracks and signs and moved the chairs into a train formation.  The kids thought it was so fun when they came in.

 I punched their tickets and they came in and found a seat on the train. 

Then we had hot chocolate with marshmallows and cookies. 

Then the train departed the station, the lights went out, and we watched the story of the Polar Express.  If you would like to listen to it at home, you can go HERE, just scroll down a bit and then click on the Polar Express link.  At the end of the ride, everyone got a special bell and then the kids had free choice center time!

 On Friday, we attended the school sing-a-long. 

We sang Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer while wearing some little red paper noses and Jingle Bells.

 Then we got to listen to the rest of the school sing and participated in some sing along songs too.

This week our star student was Brecken.  He had a good time showing the class his stuffed animal monster with sunglasses.

And we celebrated back to back birthdays this week!  Aiden turned 6 on Wednesday and Burke turned 6 on Thursday.  Happy birthday boys and thanks for the treats you shared with us!

You Can't Catch Me, I'm the Gingerbread Man!

We had another fun week working with the gingerbread man and his story!

Here is a little video and song the kids enjoyed this week:

We wrote about what we would look like, who we would run away from, and what our gingerbread house would look like if we were gingerbread boys or girls.

We hunted for gingerbread men with sight words and letters on them.

We played a teen number gingerbread game.  Sometimes the fox would get drawn and then he would eat all of the gingerbread cards we had collected.

We sorted gingerbread men that were holding pictures of various objects into gingerbread houses based on the vowel sound of their picture.

We made a class big book of the gingerbread man story.  Here is how it turned out:

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One of their favorite things to do this week was eat gingerbread men cookies and write about the order of how they ate them.

The kids had to eat just one bite at a time, then write about what they did first, next, then, and last.  It wasn't always easy.  One little guy said, "Ms. Monsivais! I have a problem!  The cookie was just too good, so I ate it all!"  I love kindergarteners! 

They enjoyed every bit and bite of this activity.  :)

After we ate our gingerbread men, we did a little graphing activity and showed which part of the gingerbread man we ate first.  The head won, legs came in second place, and arms were last.

For part of our computer time, we decorated our own gingerbread houses!  You can play this game at home HERE.

We also had fun making silly sentences about Santa.

We decorated Christmas trees and counted the ornaments.

We sorted shapes.

We played an addition game with dice.

 And we practiced writing our teen numbers with a fun game during math time.

This week, we focused on learning about periods, question marks, and exclamation marks.  We talked about how to use them, what our voice sounds like when we read them, and how to identify them.  We will practice more next week.

Ivory's mom, who is our Great Artist specialist, came in this week and helped us learn about Dürer's Rhinoceros woodcut print:

The kids got to make their own print in a piece of styrofoam.

Then we rolled ink on them with a brayer,

and had some awesome original works of art when we were finished.

In PE, we got out some big Rudolph noses and played some reindeer games.  :)  We played catch ancd throw with a partner.

We practiced guiding Santa's sleigh with our noses.

And I had them all pose for a big reindeer picture.  Cutest reindeer ever!

 We got to sing happy 6th birthday to Ivory! 

And Gracie was our star student.  She showed us a special scarf her mom's friend made for her.

Get ready for even more Christmas fun next week!