It’s Wednesday and you know what that means! It’s time to announce the topic of this week’s holiday giveaway. I’m going to get right to it since I’m pretty sure you’re busy keeping your “reindeer” in line!
This week’s giveaway topic is ho-ho holiday favorites. What is a ho-ho holiday favorite? It’s any favorite holiday tip, suggestion, or activity.
Can’t wait to hear from you! And remember, to be entered in this week’s drawing for a gift certificate from The Mailbox and a holiday surprise, you must post your ho-ho holiday favorite by the end of Sunday, December 12.
Joyfully,
Diane
Here’s one of my own ho-ho holiday favorites. Rather than assign students a page of math problems, write the answers to the problems on the board. (Make sure the page has more than ten problems.) Ask each child to draw the outline of a holiday shape on one half of her math paper and have her write ten answers from the board inside her outline. Then, one at a time, announce the problems from the math page in a random order. Each child solves the problem on her paper. If the answer is inside her holiday outline, she crosses it out. Math practice is over when one student in the class crosses out all ten of her answers. My students loved the fact that they might only have to complete ten math problems. I was tickled that math practice was taking place in an organized fashion and that there were no papers to grade!
This week my kindergarten team and I created a whole unit of activities around the book, Polar Express. The week before we created a unit on Gingerbread and read many different Gingerbread Man stories. We incorporate art, language, phonics, math, and more.
The last week before Winter Break we will be doing different activities involving Christmas around the World. We will be reading books, making arts and crafts to go with that holiday, playing games, and of course incorporating phonics, reading, and math.
So far the kiddos are really enjoying what we are doing!
This has been a fun filled christmas activity week for my kindergartens. During math and reading We have created patterns using christmas ornaments( using letters and numbers), all while study the orgin of the ornament. We have made reindeers using hand prints for the antlers and foot prints for the body and topped them off with googly eyes. During Morning activities, we discussed weather, and the proper gear that needs to be worn during the winter…then we got together and made our own cozy snowmen:)
Every year we work with our 3rd grade buddies to make a hand print calendar as a gift for the families. The kids like getting”messy” while doing the hand prints and families really like the gift.
I also do different activities for the other holiday, …like make a driedel after reading a Hanukkah story. I really like sharing family traditions too, so I invite families to come in and share what they do.We end with a buddy activity making gingerbread houses. The kids love to get together and build the houses. Parents are invited too. It makes December really busy but it is worth it.
I had a great time with my preschoolers today. I told the story of the Gingerbread Man on the flannel board. We made gingerbread men cookies. Then out of pretraced paper bags we made gingerbread man dolls. We cut them out, stapled them stuffed them with cotton balls that we sprinkled ginger on and decorated them with glitter paint and markers. You can add ribbon to hang from the tree and your house smells like ginger.
Then to blow off the excitement of the season we made snowflakes from coffee filters and what do you do with snow?? We crumbled them and made snowballs and had a snowball fight.
Lots of seasonal fun.
I also teach kindergarten. I like incorporating The Polar Express into our curriculum. We read the original story and The Journey Begins. We compare the two stories and talk about simmilarities and differences. Then we watch the movie and compare it to both the stories. When the children come back from lunch, they find the silver bells on their table and we talk about what the bell represents and review what the true meaning of Christmas means to them. The children love the story and I use it to teach across the curriculum. We usually do this over two days. The children really love it!
December is the perfect time to introduce backwards counting to 4-year-old pre-kinder students.
We have been counting down the days until Christmas. Each day, one of our classroom jobs is to count the days until December 25. it’s a big deal for the students. 🙂
This week during center time my kindergarten students are making countdown chains. To make the chain, they alternate strips of red/green construction paper. Then, they attach the chain to a star cutout that has a cute countdown poem. From now until Christmas Eve, they will remove one link from the chain before they go to bed.
This activity is easy and fun plus it reinforces counting and patterning skills.
1) game to play at holiday parties – pin the nose on Rudolph (can just draw the Rudolph on the board
2) make hot chocolate and give out silver bells after reading Polar Express
3) make snowglobes with baby food jars, water and iridescent or white glitter -and little snowmen or holiday figures- (good in Jauary too)
4) have students make their own menorahs by giving them a construction paper cut-out and let them color strips (candles) and add the flames when they put it on paper background
5)do weaving mats for Kwanzaa or Christmas with strips of colored paper -then laminate
6) study Holidays Around the World –in order to get in all the holiday traditions and customs and see the similarities in several countries –
7)make candy canes with white pipe cleaners/chenille stems and red and white beads in a pattern
8)make 3-d Christmas trees with two green paper trees intertwined with each other at the top and the bottom by cutting a slit and sliding them onto each other -decorate with glitter as tinsel
1. Make bead wreaths for the tree with colored beads and pipe cleaners.
2. Make chains to put on the tree using the over, under velcro term to put the chains together (Preschool).
3. Make spiral ornaments different colored using cutting skills to cut the spiral lines.
4. Do pictures and handprints along with the Sometimes I’m very small poem to give to the parents for Christmas.
5. We’re doing a group meeting of Cookies with Santa so the class can come get their pictures with Santa and decorate a cookie.
I use Christmas themed stamps and let the students make patterns.
We are finishing up our gingerbread man unit. We read several different versions of the story and completed a venn diagram comparing and contrasting them. We completed a gingerbread man glyph and tomorrow we will make gingerbread man cookies out of a cake mix. Lots of fun!