Woohoo! Holiday recess (as my district calls it) has finally begun! I tried to start a blog post early this week to share what we've been working hard on in class this past month, but exhaustion settled in and it never got finished. But fear not! I plan to finish the post during this break so stay tuned to hear about our gingerbread adventures later!
Today, however, I thought I would have enough energy to make a short post to share my holiday gifts this year. I really relied heavily on Pinterest this year, but they turned out cute! Here we go!
Double Chocolate & Toffee Cookies in a jar for the grade-level team and principal! Credit: Crazy Little Projects
Reindeer Hot Cocoa for the "lunch bunch" Credit: Thrifty Jinxy
Books from Scholastic, cocoa drizzled kettle korn from Trader Joe's (snowman bags from Michaels), and pencils from the Target dollar section for the students! The card was made via Vistaprint.
The kids especially loved their gifts. They really enjoyed the popcorn while watching a Charlie Brown Christmas, and were super excited after coming in from lunch when they saw presents on their desks!
Hope everyone is enjoying their holiday break! Don't forget to relax, relax, and RELAX! :D
I've been trying to write a Five for Friday post ever since Friday but all my pictures are on my phone and for some reason they keep failing to upload on blogger. Major sadness. That only means that I will have to go back to using my camera to take pictures because I'm simply too lazy to email all the pics on the phone to the computer. However, my phone is doing a good job uploading to instagram and twitter so let's pull some pictures from there to share the big highlight from last week! We only had three days of school (2.5 really since Friday is a half day for us) so there wasn't much happening anyways.
Children's author, Kathryn Otoshi came to visit our school and also autographed books! If you haven't read her books, One, Zero, and Two, you definitely should! Not only do they teach social skills, they also dabble in some math skills too! (even, odd, greater than, less than, number values, skip counting, etc.)
Love her autographs! So cute!
Check out the books on Amazon!
Full disclosure: Affliate links below
We also talked about Veterans' Day. We watched some videos below that my wonderful colleague found:
Reading of the book, The Wall by Eve Bunting:
A good explanation of the poppy's significance with veterans:
Then we did some writing and made a poppy craft.
The air is starting to get chilly (North California resident here) which also means the holidays are secretly creeping up on us. That brings me on to my next topic...
HOLIDAY GIFTS!
What do you give your students and what do you have your students make to give their families? I usually order books for my students through Scholastic as my gift to them. Student gifts to the families have varied every year from wax paper lanterns to sock snowmen. However, no matter what the gift is, we always pair it with a 2015 calendar. People have been asking me when the 2015 calendar is coming out and it's finally here! Best of all, just like all my other calendars, this one is free too!
If you need some ideas on how to make this calendar into a gift, below are some pictures of what I've done with them in the past. Click on the picture to get to the corresponding blog post to read more!
Another crazy week to come! It's parent-teacher conference week! We get a full week of minimum days which end at 11:20. That means minus the 1.5 hours of ELA time I'm committing myself to (1 hour small group, 30min whole group), I only have around 50 minutes of instruction time for other subjects every day! Not sure how much we are going to get accomplished this week but we will see what we can do!
Did I really make it through this week? I have no idea how. But I am here for Five for Friday! No energy left so we'll just make it a post with mainly pictures and very little words....
Chipotle Teacher Appreciation Day w/ a colleague for dinner.
Teacher Appreciation Day at school. Breakfast delivered by a student. Flowers given by another. Lunch buffet provided by parents.
Creating our Mother's Day gift using the toilet paper tubes we painted last week.
Working in partners to create a picture by following step-by-step directions that gave precise dimensions for each aspect of the picture.
Adding final touches to our Mother's Day frames and "wrapping" them up. They turned out so cute! I'll bet the moms will love them! :)
Oh no! I was halfway through my post and then Blogger froze and none of this entry got saved! Guess I have to start over again...
Well, I admit. My poor blog has been neglected once again, and I have so much to share about the past two weeks! Rather than write one very loooooong post, I'm going to chunk it into two posts, one for each week. So, let's rewind!
WEEK BEFORE WINTER BREAK
So much to accomplish during that week before winter break! Nothing really in the academic realm besides Math so we spent the week doing centers and research for our next project, becoming an expert on something relating to the Prehistoric Era!
This one wanted to know everything about volcanoes.
Practicing our antonyms!
Reading Scholastic News!
Making compound words!
We also spent the week creating and finishing our cards and gifts to our buddies and family.
Making cards for our kinder buddies.
Some were trying their hand in making pop-up cards.
2014 calendars for the family.
Also made lavender-scented sock snowmen as another family gift.
We also wrapped up the week with our winter party! The parents led the kids through some crafts and games (not pictured)...
Making mason jar snowglobes.
Ta-da!
Add a ribbon and give it a little shake and it's done!
...then we enjoyed some delicious and cute snacks while watching Mr. Popper's Penguins! Great movie! If you haven't seen it yet, I would definitely recommend it!
And that was the week before winter break. Left the school with a bundle of gifts filled with student love. After placing them all around my Charlie Brown Christmas Tree, I could barely see the tree!
Lastly, for those have you who wanted to know treat I made my co-workers this year...
