Christmas Rewind and New Year's SALE!

I have been MIA for awhile! The last two weeks of school were crazy between having benchmark testing, our cute little holiday show, and gingerbread house building party. The minute school got out, I dove right into all the Christmas festivities, so I haven't had much of a chance to sit and update my little blog until now! I've got pictures of activities to share, so hopefully they will be useful for you to log away some ideas for next year! We did the Elf on the Shelf again this year, and the kids absolutely loved it, but this year I had some skeptical friends that took some convincing on my part to believe in the "magic"! To introduce the fabulous candy cane graph activity from Deanna Jump's Christmas Math and Literacy Fun unit, I had our elf deliver candy canes to the students one morning:

Then we used our 5 senses to brainstorm as many words as we could to describe candy canes; then completed the cute Christmas tree graph to see how many of us liked candy canes or not. As you can see, "yes" won in a landslide!

                  
We participated in a ton of fun holiday themed centers during the month of December.

1. This one is called "String the Lights" and the kids LOVED it! I strung two huge pieces of yarn across our big carpet - one line was to build -at family words, and the other line was to build -an family words. Then they wrote their words on the recording sheet and drew the picture to match!

 

2. "Bakin' Up Sight Words" - the students chose a Christmas cookie card, read the sight word, and recorded it in the matching space on the response sheet.

 

 

3. "Elf Number Order" - I gave each student a number card out of order and they had to work together to put the cards in order from 1-20. Once they completed that part of the activity, they ordered the numbers themselves for independent practice.

 





All of these centers and much, much more can be found in my Deck the Halls {Christmas Math & Literacy Centers} unit on TPT! There are sight word games, labeling activities, counting on, more/less, and ordering numbers math activities, sentence building games, and MORE! And it's on sale for today only! So even though Christmas is over, you can get it now and be really prepared for next year. ;)

 There are so many great holiday books to read at this time of year, and one of our favorites is, of course, How the Grinch Stole Christmas. We used Deanna Jump's fantastic Grinch unit activity to brainstorm all the ways we would make the Grinch grin.. and let me tell you, my little kinder babies melted my heart with some of their responses. My favorite? "Give him a mom." Love. Here is a web we made of some of our ideas (and can I just say how proud I was of my Grinch drawing? Yeah, it turned out kinda awesome).

 



 

We also made a list of adjectives to describe what the Grinch was like before his heart grew 3 sizes.

 

Here were a few of my favorite craftivities my kiddos came up with. And let me tell you, even though they are young, after reading the 1st ("give him a family") and 4th ("give him a mom") ways they would make him grin, it makes you realize that sometimes kids are pretty astute.

Another favorite story, among many, is Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett. After reading the story, I told the students I had made them gingerbread cookies, but when I got the container out to show them, they were GONE! Of course, they had run away just like the cookie had in the story. ;) To make the gingerbread baby come back, the boy built him a gingerbread house, so we did the same in hopes that our cookies would return to us! We made little houses like this, left them on our desks, and thankfully it made the cookies come running back while my littles were at P.E.! What impeccable timing!

 



There you have a little snapshot and rewind of some of the activities we participated in this holiday season! Now that the New Year is upon us, I have a gift for you! For today only I am throwing a sale in my TPT store - 20% everything until midnight tonight!

Prayers Through Tragedy

Words can't describe how I felt hearing about the terrible tragedy in Connecticut. I was with my own kindergarten babies when I found out and I just wanted to hug them all and never let go. As teachers, this hits too close to home for all of us. I can't fathom evil this big. I am praying for healing.

Show Us What You Bought! And the Elf arrives...

I was loving the huge sale TPT had over Black Friday weekend, so I'm participating in the "Show Us What You Bought" linky from Blog Hoppin'! I'm super excited to use the few units I bought.

Trust me when I say there were a lot more that I wanted to buy, but I had to FORCE myself to leave it on my wishlist! Ha! Here's what did make it through the check-out line:

1. Morning Math by Donna Glynn
2. 10 Frame Flash Cards by Donna Glynn (love that these are already made for me now!)
3. The Backpack Boogie: Centers and Games for Back to School by Growing Kinders
4. Autumn Math and Literacy Centers by Deanna Jump and Julie Lee (love)

Can't wait to put all of these new centers together! And how perfect is Donna's Morning Math? Her worksheets will be great for bellwork or a quick warm-up. Thanks ladies!

I also wanted to thank everyone who purchased my Shapes Galore for the Common Core! unit and my new Deck the Halls {12 Christmas Math and Literacy Centers} unit during the sale. I so appreciate your support and I have been blown away by your kind, kind comments about each of those products. I don't feel worthy! :)

Today The Elf on the Shelf made its first appearance of the year. After much debating and voting, we decided that his name would be "Elfie the Elf". Original, I know. I was kinda rooting for Carlos... or School Shelf. School Shelf the Elf, now doesn't that have a nice ring to it? Oh well, I wasn't in charge of naming him...

December Currently

What? December already? I love participating in Farley's Currently linky every month. It's fun finding out about new blogs that way!

 

I'm very excited... The Elf on the Shelf makes its first appearance in my classroom tomorrow! Last year my kids had an absolute ball with it so I'm hoping this year's group loves it just as much... I mean, how can you not? And it's the best behavior motivator ever! So fun!

Deck the Halls {12 Math and Literacy Centers Unit} and a SALE!

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you all had a wonderful holiday. Did any of you venture out and go shopping on Black Friday? I did... found some great deals! The good news is, great shopping deals don't end today! TPT is throwing a HUGE sale where you can get discounts up to 28% off at all your favorite shops! I am going to be participating as well, and every product in my store will be 20% off - just use the code CMT12 to get the additional discount! I've got 4 units available for purchase: Shapes Galore for the Common Core (my best selling product!), Deck the Halls {12 Christmas Math and Literacy Centers} (my BRAND NEW product!), ABC Order Picture Sort Pack, and Plants and Living Things Observation Journal.

Click on the picture below to go straight to my TPT store!

Thanks to Ashley Hughes for the adorable banner!  

I have created a brand new unit just in time for the holidays: Deck the Halls {12 Math and Literacy Centers for Christmas}! It includes 12 fun, hands on centers with response sheets for every station! Some of the activities include -at/an family word building, sight word practice, dice games, 2 different Santa labeling activities, ordering numbers, more/less board games, rhyming words, counting on activities, and more! It is the perfect addition to your December activities! Click on the preview picture below to go directly to the unit in my shop to download the preview and check it out!

 

 

Happy shopping! I know I'm going to be filling up my cart in preparation for the big sale!

Smorgasboard of activities and a Thanksgiving FREEBIE!

Happy Sunday, friends! It's been a few weeks since I last updated about the activities I have going on in my classroom, so today's blog will be a relative smorgasboard of different activities! And I've got a Thanksgiving math station freebie at the end, so make sure to read the whole thing! :)

Awhile back we wrapped up our colors unit - I think that's one of my favorite units to teach because there are so many great activities you can do. We learned color word songs to help us learn how to read and write them and the kids love them so much that they'll just randomly burst into song throughout the day! We make a fancy color songs flip book for them to take home and practice with their families. (Unfortunately I didn't get a picture of it!) We also read Pete the Cat (of course) and created the little sentence building craftivity that's all over Pinterest. They cut up their sentence, put it back in order, and then built their Pete the Cat with the color shoes that their sentence had.

We also read The Crayon Box That Talked - I love that book - and I created a response sheet for the kids to complete. Below is my partially completed version that I did with the kids under the document camera. On the back, the kids had to combine all the things the character drew in the story to make an illustration with "lots of details". I challenged them to fill up the entire picture space (easier said than done for a 5-year old on an 11x17 piece of paper) and most of them did! My kids have been so cute with their writing and illustrations -- they'll ask me, "Did I use lots of details?" or "Look at all the good details I used!" I've noticed a big change in their writing because of it... love it!

We've also been working on a ton of labeling activities, still. Our latest vocab from our reading series was clothing words, so one of my amazing (former) teammates made up this little draw and label clothing activity - it's so funny to see how they draw themselves! I love the meticulousness of the striped shirt! Haha!

I didn't end up doing TONS of Halloween activities with my kiddos -- I mostly incorporated those activities into their math and literacy center time. We are currently finishing up our bat unit, so I'll post all of those activities when we are done! The kids are loving it. In the meantime, here are a few things that I did do. We sang the poem "5 Little Pumpkins" and created this craftivity to practice working with our ordinal numbers. I wish I had a picture of one of the completed versions my kids did -- theirs turned out much more cute and colorful! Here's the model I created to show them:

I also made a version of this poem that I got from A Place Called Kindergarten for the kids to work on in their interactive notebooks. We highlighted sight words we knew and then drew all the characters we read about in the poem! If you haven't checked out Mrs. Bell's blog, PLEASE go and see her posts on interactive notebooks! She has some fantastic ideas!

 Poem idea from Mrs. Bell at A Place Called Kindergarten

And finally, some quality gifts courtesy of my kinder kids. Haha. Love the "ghost poop"! ;)

Okay, okay, you've stuck with me this long! Thank you! Now for the FREEBIE! I made a little Thanksgiving themed math station for counting on from a given number in a known sequence. This concept has been a little tough for some of my kiddos so I thought this math station would be a fun way to practice it. Click on the picture below to get to my TPT store and download it for free! Enjoy! :)

Currently November!

Wait, what?! It's November? Did we even have the month of October? It went by too fast... but the good news is, November means a new "Currently" linky from Farley over at Oh Boy 4th Grade!

I'm going to have a Thanksgiving themed math freebie in my next blog post, so be sure to check back in a few days! In the meantime, here's what I'm "currently" up to!