Snowmen!

Now that Christmas is over and the children have taken home their presents I can show you what we made for Christmas presents for Mom and Dad!  I have been making these snowmen with my classes for over 15 years I think... That means that there are hundreds of these guys out there.
And that best part is that I have parents coming and telling me that they come out every year for Christmas and are a favourite!
My husband is a secret helper in that he cuts up the wood for me!  Thanks, hubby!

Each year at the end of November I put three blocks of wood and a small piece of sandpaper in a ziplock bag for each of my students.  The blocks are one each of rough cut two by fours, two by threes, and two by twos!  I teach the children how to sand the blocks and we sand away for several weeks.  They love to sand and beg for "sanding time"!

When we decide they are smooth enough we have a painting day! We do one coat with white craft paint watered down.  The next day we do one coat of glitter paint really watered down.  I will be posting more detailed instructions at a later date.

Then we have a day when we put them all together!

They really look cute all together! 

I know the children really enjoyed making them!  I think they were pretty proud of them too!  

Fun Christmas Projects!

We worked on a variety of projects over the last few weeks!  We have a couple more to finish before Christmas!  Tomorrow we are going to make these neat ornaments as a buddy project!  I saw a few neat ornament projects using plastic ornament balls to make snowmen but couldn't get the materials organized easily or was worried how to do them quickly as a buddy project.
As I was wandering around our local craft store trying like mad to come up with an idea I realized that if I combined two different ideas together I had a quick and easy solution to my buddy project. One of the ornament ideas I saw on Pinterest had tinsel in the ball and another used ornamental snow in the ball to make a snowman face.  I pinned both ideas on my Pinterest site.  Brainwave!  Use white tinsel in the ball instead of the snow and draw the face on with sharpies!  Bought some tinsel that had snowflakes mixed in to the tinsel and experimented at home!  A three inch piece of tinsel pushed into the ornament with a pencil and a sharpie face drawn on and we are done.  Add the name and the date on the back and we have a keepsake for both the big buddy and the little buddy!

We also made a Christmas count-up book.  Take a look!

The children has fun decorating the trees in their books and then the cover of the book.  This one is from my Christmas fun package.  You can find it at my Teachers Pay Teachers store.  

The elf on the shelf has also been having fun in our classroom.  We made a little booklet chronicling some of her adventures with the little ghost named Gus who manages to hide my stapler and leave us notes each day.  

Here Sparkles and Gus are on a life size baby Stegosaurus that we had on our wall for a while.  

Each day they manage to find a different spot to visit in the classroom and have left puzzles and Christmas books on various days.  Lots of fun!  

This is our contribution to the door decorating contest!  

The children completed applications to become elves and then we made elves to hold the applications.  Found this great idea at The First Grade Parade.  Thanks!   There are lots of neat ideas there!  

Lots more to tell but have to go make some gingerbread!  Will post pictures of our Christmas presents soon!

Santa Hat Books

We started working on Christmas vocabulary words this week.  I used the Christmas vocabulary material from my Christmas Fun package.

The children seemed to really enjoy the activity and really did a great job! I decided to use the colour it yourself version and I am glad I did.  The colouring was a "want to" not a "have to" activity but most of the children choose to colour their booklets after they had finished matching the sentence strips to the correct picture.  Some even wanted to take their colouring pencils home so they could finish it at home!  They were doing that particular a job!  

I just used the pocket chart pages at the original size that they come in the package and they worked out great!  You can increase the size on your photocopier by selecting the option that lets you increase the size from an 8 X 11 sheet to an 11 X 17 sheet but I found I didn't need to.  I printed off a colour version of the pocket chart pictures and laminated them as well as the pocket chart strips this time.  But you don't have to as they work just as well just in paper form.  I didn't have time to laminate my Halloween package sentence strips and they are still in great shape.  

The children helped me match the sentence strips to the correct picture in the pocket chart.  When they went to their seats to do their own they did great.  I found that telling them to match the sentence strips to the pictures before cutting the sheets into pages worked really well. 

I made simple Santa hat covers for the books by folding a red construction paper in half and chopping off the  top two corners to make a hat shape.  A strip of white paper on the bottom and a cotton ball on the top and you have a funky Santa hat cover!  

We also worked on math addition concepts with the Christmas workspaces.  We call it "Add it Up" and the children really like it.   They use the workspaces to make an addition story at their desk.  They record their story on the Add it Up sheet and then go to their friend's desks and record their stories too.  There are 18 spaces on the worksheet and I have 22 students so they get lots of practise, have fun, and get a chance to move around too!  They love the new Christmas workspaces.  Especially the gingerbread house!  

I put out the counting tubs Christmas work spaces during Blue Bin time.  The children have to put the cards in order from one to ten.  Then they put the appropriate number of objects on each card.  Lots of counting practise and fun!