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Tuesday, December 10, 2013

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas



           Today we have a second snow day! :(  Normally,  I'm like any other teacher and love snow days but I had so many fun things planned for this week.  Oh well... hopefully we'll get back tomorrow for more Gingerbread Fun!
         We are reading LOTS of versions of the Gingerbread Man. We've also been talking about characters, setting and plot and have been doing lots of comparing and contrasting.  We will be graphing our favorite version later this week. In addition, we've done the following:

Gingerbread Playdough



We are making gingerbread cookies with our delicious smelling gingerbread play dough.  The recipe is from Sweet Sugar Belle and the color comes from all the delicious spices in the recipe.  

A Gingerbread Exchange

We participated in Growing in Pre-K's Gingerbread exchange.  Thanks Eilis for organizing this fun exchange.
The gingerbread man we sent to 12 other schools reversed to a reindeer.  So cute.

Gingerbread crafts, glyphs and poems
We decorated paper gingerbread men with white crayons.


Of course, we will decorate real cookies too.

We decorate the classroom 

Lots of Dollar Store decorations and blue ticky-tac to decorate our dollhouse for a gingerbread family!





This class LOVES imaginative play and decorating.
working on an elf home


wrapping blocks to use as pretend presents

using our dot markers to make lights

This is the elf house or reindeer's home (depending on the day:)

Sunday, December 8, 2013

Adorable Holiday Gifts for My Students

        Each year our preschool teachers make gifts that we give to all the students at our holiday program. I love the VERY simple, inexpensive light up snowman ornaments we made this year. These have been all over Pinterest but I'm not sure where they started.
        For each ornament we used a battery operated tea light (from the Dollar Store), a small piece of thick holiday scrapbook paper cut in the shape of a hat, a small pompom,  and 2 pieces of ribbon (each about 4" long).  You will also need a black permanent marker and a hot glue gun.


 
We tied a knot in the middle of the wider piece of ribbon (for the scarf) and made a loop with the narrow ribbon (to hang the ornament) .  We added face details with the marker (and put our school name and the date on the back of the hat) and then hot glued the ribbons and paper hat to the tea light.  When it is lit, the nose is orange! So cute!
I also made little elf ornaments for our classroom tree.  They were also very simple! After they decorated our tree, we used them as gift tags on the hand print calendars we made for our families.


I started by taking a picture of each child wearing an elf hat with their hands together above their heads (or just in a silly position if they preferred). 
I then cut the student out of the picture, laminated the picture, punched a small hole in the top and threaded a pipe cleaner with a bell on it to make a loop to hang the elf on the tree.  The kids love their silly elf ornaments (and I predict they will like them even more in future years when they look back at how cute and silly they were in pre-K).


Finally, if you'd like directions for the beautiful picture ornaments we made for the kids last year, click here.

If your looking for a really fun holiday idea for your classroom or home, check out our life-size gingerbread house.