12.19.15: The Best Things We Did This Week!

Hey, teacher friends! We made it! I am sitting here with a lovely cup of coffee and relishing the fact that I have 16 days of blissful break time. This is one of the times of the year when it's GREAT to be a teacher!

I am really sad, though, because I didn't get nearly enough pictures of all the cutie-patootie things we did this week. I was so busy doing the fun stuff with the kids that snapping pictures just didn't happen. Sigh.

Wednesday was Grinch Day...we read the story, did some character anaylsis, watched the cartoon version, and did some writing. I do have pictures of the writing activity, which I saw over on Mrs. Lemon's blog:

"I feel grouchy when my mommy wakes me up." HA! Yes, waking up makes most of our class grouchy, it seems!

I made the pieces myself but I found a pin on Pinterest that showed exactly what pieces you will need. I used a frame I had in a set from TPT to make the face and then played around with some shapes in PowerPoint to create the eyes and hat.

We also made Grinch ornaments. I don't have pictures of the exact ones the kids made, but this is the one Little Miss made last year:

They are super easy to make. I buy two bags of green feathers at the craft store and clear ornaments. (This year I lucked out and got plastic ones at Michael's for 70% off, which made them .29 each!) I pop the tops off and let the kids stuff the insides with feathers and then stick a red glitter heart sticker on the front. Boom! Easy peasy Christmas craft.

What else did we do? Let's see...I did some things that I've seen on other awesome blogs like the adorable mice from The First Grade Parade to go along with "If You Take A Mouse to the Movies". I found the craft templates that Mary from Sharing Kindergarten posted as a freebie here (with Cara's permission, no worries!). They turned out really cute and I am sad I didn't snap any pictures. :( We also did some snowmen word problems. I was going to be SO ahead of the game and post them in the hallway yesterday afternoon to have ready for January...but then my parent volunteers accidentally passed them out to the kids yesterday when we were trying to get all of their ornaments/crafts/goodies into their goody bags. I didn't realize it until yesterday afternoon when I was getting the room straightened up. OOPS! I will have to come up with something else cute!

Yesterday was party-palooza. We used to spread all of the holiday stuff out a little bit, but now our principal prefers for us to have all of the crazy stuff on one day! Yesterday we watched The Polar Express in our jammies, went to the holiday sing-along, and had our holiday party in the afternoon. I had approximately 17 minutes with the kids aside from all of that, haha! It was a crazy day but a good one.

I hope everyone has a merry Christmas and a fabulous holiday break! January will be here before we know it!