Getting Ready for Christmas

Although Thanksgiving is over, I'm loving the Cornbread Dressing leftovers! I've made good progress on getting my home decorated for Christmas and for the first time ever, I know how good it feels to have a big part of my Christmas shopping already finished!  My goal for the rest of the weekend is to finish working on some more Winter and Christmas products for my TPT store. 

We spent the two days of school during Thanksgiving week doing our annual Christmas Craft days.  Our students rotate through all four kindergarten classes and make an ornament in each classroom. By the end of the two days, each student had a total of 8 ornaments.  With the creation of Pinterest, the four of us decided to find new ornaments to make this year and get away from our outdated ornaments. 

My coworker found this adorable picture on Pinterest but the link to it was no longer valid so we had to use the picture to figure out how to create them. Ours looked very similar to these except we could not figure out what they put in the clear balls to make them colored...we tried glitter paint but it didn't turn out right so we ended up filling the reindeer, elf & Santa with brown and red shredded paper and the snowman with snow confetti.  

  

My second ornament was these adorable cupcake ornaments that I found on YouTube! I found pastel pink ornaments at Hobby Lobby and used tacky glue to paint glue from the hanger to about half way down the ornament. We then sprinkled snow confetti (irredescent) to the glue and then hot glued it into a silver mini cupcake foil liner at an angle. The cherries on top were cut from a floral pick that I also found at Hobby Lobby and hot glue on. The pretty hangers made these so elegant looking. The pastel pink was so pretty but we had trouble finding 100 of the pink ornaments so we offered the boys a choice of turquoise blue or pale green and they turned out pretty good too.

 

I plan to make an entire set of the pink for my little 3 foot tree in my house and add a candy garland to make my own "sweet" little Christmas tree!

 

Now back to the classroom...My kids will be so excited to go to the Home Living center next week. They will be sorting Christmas cookies by beginning sounds using the Gingerbread men from my Cooking Christmas cookies package, some small spatulas, cookie sheets, and some gingerbread man plates I found at Dollar Tree many years ago.

 

         

 

 

Click on the pictures above to check it out! 

 

 

I can't wait to read all of the different versions of the Gingerbread Man stories soon! Here is the Gingerbread Man is on the Loose package that we will also do during Gingerbread Man week!

 

Click on the picture to take you to this product.

 

 

 

 

Naughty or Nice? It Doesn't Matter!

 

It's that time again! Several times a year, the administrators of the Teachers Pay Teachers website host a sale in which they give up a portion of their profits in addition to any discounts that the individual sellers offer. If you use the PROMO code: CMT12 at checkout you will get a total of 25% off of your total price from my store! Go NOW and fill up your wish lists and shopping carts and then go back on Monday or Tuesday to check out while on your planning or lunch time!  I have been revising & improving most of my Christmas products so be sure to check those out!

Christmas is Coming!

I did the unthinkable! Yes, I pulled out a few of my Christmas decorations before Thanksgiving! I never do that but the Hallmark Channel keeps playing all of those Christmas movies all weekend long and I just couldn't help myself! Just a few though.  I decided to distract myself from decking the halls all of the way by revising all of my Christmas products on TPT. This time last year I was just getting started and learning all about creating things to sell so the quality just wasn't the best. Boy have I learned alot in the past year and made many revisions to my things but I'm not finished just yet. Here are some of the new and/or improved things I have so far... If you have bought any of these (any of my things really) then go to My Purchases on the TPT homepage and check for any updates. You can also click on the pictures to take you directly to the product. The weekend isn't over yet so check back again in a few days!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Have a Blessed Thanksgiving!

 

 

 

Winter: Hibernate, Migrate, or Stay Active?

We spent last week learning about how animals get ready for the winter! With the new time change and it getting dark much earlier, I have been getting ready for winter a little myself! I love coming home from school and putting on my warm, fuzzy pajamas and enjoying soup that is waiting on me in the crockpot. To make it even better, the Hallmark channel has already been showing Christmas movies all weekend. No better way to get ready for winter for me!

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Now back to the animals... we started talking about how animals that stay active in the winter prepare for winter by growing thicker fur and storing up food. Our math activity was supposed to have my little "squirrels" search the room for nuts such as acorns, walnuts, and pecans and then sort, count, and graph them. (I had a little "nut" issue so we didn't get to do this activity yet).

Then we talked about how some animals hibernate and sleep the winter away (that would be me!) When we talked about how some animals migrate, we watched a short BrainPop Jr. video that showed how the geese fly to the south in a V formation so they can find food. I taught the kids Dr. Jean's song called Directions to learn about North, South, East, & West and pulled out a map & globe to show where we are (Southeast TN) and where the North & South would be. Good to bring in the discussion of where the North & South Poles are since Christmas is coming soon. I also have magnets in my science center which brought up a good teachable moment to talk about the North & South Poles of a magnet.

I hung up a sign in the North side of the classroom where my little "geese" shivered in the cold and had trouble finding fish to eat because the lakes were frozen.

 

 It took a little team work to get my geese into a V formation (masking tape on the floor made this a bit easier to organize) and then we talked about how the leader had the hardest job of flying against the wind and then practiced "flying" across the room in our V formation.

 

 

 Once we got to the South, the kids easily found fish to eat (Goldfish crackers) and loved using their "beaks" to eat them.

 

 

I found some of these fun ideas from http://www.littlegiraffes.com/animalsinwinter.html. She has a great unit for Animals Getting Ready for Winter, just wish we had more time to do more of the activities!

 

 

 



Pumpkin Decorating Contest

I must say I work with some very creative people!  Our Parent-Teacher program came up with a great fundraiser. Each classroom was given a pumpkin and asked to decorate it but the only rule was to not carve it.The pumpkins were put on display in the front hall and students & parents could vote on their favorite pumpkin by paying $1. The winning classroom earns pizza party and the teacher wins a free 1/2 day off from school! Here are some of the pumpkins that were on display...

 

  

 



The Little Young Class That Isn't Afraid of Anything!

Several years ago our school was fortunate enough to receive a very large art grant. Some of the money was used to bring in different types of artists. My absolute favorite was Mrs. Kathleen also known as The Puppet Lady. One of the activities she did with the kids was to read the book The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything and had the kids help retell the story using props. They absolutely loved it!  My coworkers and I did several days of scarecrows and finished it up with this book and decided to make our very own and much smaller version of the scarecrow and this is what we came up with...

 Ok now say it with me…”THAT IS SO ADORABLE!” One of my kindergarten friends has a toddler that is always dressed so cute and she brought in some of his hand-me downs. They are so cute and are the perfect size for our PVC frame! (I completely forgot to bring him a hat so I just used a pirate hat from my dress up center.)

 

Here is the frame we started with. My handy man husband only spent $6 on the PVC pipes & elbow pieces (easy to take apart for storage.) He also drilled a hole in the bottom of my pumpkin bucket so that it fit perfectly on the frame.

Night Creatures

I absolutely love teaching in the month of October! The fall season & Halloween "symbols" really lend themselves to incorporating nonfiction into our curriculum....and I'm pretty sure everyone knows by now that I LOVE teaching with nonfiction. Just like every other kindergarten teacher, we did a unit on Nocturnal Animals (owls, bats, raccoons, fireflies, coyotes, etc).

This simple book was an awesome nonfiction book to introduce animals that are active at night.

 

As much as I would love to lead you to believe that I did the following bulletin board, I cannot take any credit for it. My amazing assistant, Mrs. Lively put the board together using the little ones' work and some of the questions we asked and answered during our nocturnal unit.

 

 

I am trying desperately to enlarge the pictures below so you can read the interesting facts to go with each critter but I'm not having much luck: (

 

The coyotes were die cuts put onto a background that was made using artist pastels (chalk) and then blended together using a tissue or their fingers. 

 

 

 

The owls were colored with regular crayons and then we painted over the top of it using a watered down blue paint to create a Crayon Resist effect.

 

 

 

I modified this raccoon pattern from a paper bag craft I found in a Mailbox magazine years ago.

 

 

I left the bat out of this picture but we found it very interesting to find out why bats hang upside down. Did you know that their feet aren't made for standing? That was an interesting fact we discovered after reading Stellaluna and comparing & contrasting bats & birds.

 

 

After reading The Very Lonely Firefly by Eric Carle, the kids made fingerprint fireflies in a jar using 3D yellow, iridescent puffy paint. Mrs. Lively took a piece of scrap laminating film to cover the "jar" to give it shiney "jar like" appearance but you can't really tell in the picture

 

 

 

This has by far been my favorite unit yet!  This week we will be learning about Scarecrows, Skeletons, and Spiders. I've got a feeling that it will be another fun week of learning!

 

 

 

 

 



Traffic Report

I thought I would interupt my awesome fall break to share a quick activity that we did with our transportation unit! Keep reading to grab your freebie below!

 

As a culminating activity for our Transportation unit, we took the kids outside and sat them on our walking track next to the road. The kids then graphed the colors of the cars, trucks, and other vehicles that passed by. The kids absolutely loved it! The people that drove by no doubt heard the kids scream "it's another white one" or "here comes a red one!"      After we had a "winning" color on our graphs, we took our papers inside and analyzed our data (fancy Common Core Curriculum words for counting each color and writing how many.) The kids also enjoyed comparing their graphs with their classmates. and talking about why they thought there were not very many pink, purple, or orange cars and what color car their parents drove. We had planned to also graph the vehicles by type on the following day but rain kept us inside.   Grab your free copy of the Traffic Report graphing page here!       Just a week ago, I said the shameful words of a teacher...."I'm not really ready for a week off from school!" Then came the last few days before the break and I was quickly eating my words! Pancake & Pajama Day, field trip to the Pumpkin Patch, report card testing, and trying to get my lesson plans done for after the break....I definately earned my week off those last few days!  My class is just precious and I have missed them so much but spending a few days on a sunny beach while it was rainy, cold, and dreary back at home has given me a boost to keep me going until Christmas Thanksgiving break!  I will now resume my fall break!

Pumpkin Roll, Spin, Count, and Color

Do you have a set  of these wonderul clear gameboard spinners? We got a set with our new math series last year and the kids LOVE using them! Did I mention that my kids are so quiet when they are using these on their own?!?

 

You can bet your bottom dollar that anything that keeps my little darlings quiet while learning is something I just have to make more of! They love dice games and using the clear gameboard spinners but they actually enjoy working alone with them rather than work with a partner. During our farm unit last week, they used the spinners to "spin a farm animal and then graph it" during our farm unit.

Next week is our Pp week and field trip to the Pumpkin Patch so of course it was the perfect invitation to create some of these games using a pumpkin theme. They are FREE so come get yourself a set by clicking on the link or pictures below!

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Pumpkin-Roll-Color-Cover