A Very Merry Christmas!

For Christmas this year we did a ton of fun activities. Pre-K 2 started off by making gift bags for the gifts for parents.

They made these adorable ornaments for their parents this year.



Here they are working on them!





We worked on cutting and matching at centers.

Pre-K1 started working on our Christmas chain. We make one every year and it's always one of the favorite centers. I leave it out as a come and go center. They have to write a Christmas word on a strip, then they add the strip to the chain themselves.

They work really hard on it!



Even Pre-K 2 pitched in one day while they were in my class!

We hang the finished chain up. Look at all those precious pre-k written words! LOVE.

We also journaled some more, working on phonetic spelling.

Ms. Molly has a yearly tradition of caroling, and here's some Pre-K 1 elves getting ready to sing!

Here's us caroling!

One of our sweet parents took our picture when we were done!

Afterwards, we got busy getting back to centers and painting!

We made reindeer food for Santa's reindeer at art.

It was an independant center, so we had word and picture directions and they completed it themselves.

One of the most precious things in the world is watching them help one another without prompting. I watch them and hope that they will keep their compassionate and kind spirits throughout their lives. They are so quick to help a friend!

We even had an adorable reindeer volunteering to help at the reinder food table!

Next, Pre-K 1 worked on our ornaments. We made mini ornaments this year, and I think they turned out pretty cute!

Here's one finsihed!

During our class party we had a book exchange. Our room moms make our parties run SUPER smoothly and we are blessed to have them. For the exchange, they made a game where the peas switched with one another. This is the best natured group of kids, they loved the game and everyone was appreciative of their books and thanked one another.

Both classes enjoyed snacks and treats. I didn't get pictures of Pre-K 2's party, but they had super cute snacks over there, too!

At the end of our week we had Polar Express day. We wore our pj's to school and we read the book....

 

And made a train in class!

After reading the book, we lined up to have our tickets punched to in to the Polar Express movie!





We got cozy all together and enjoyed watching the movie.

We took breaks during the movie to have hot chocolate and popcorn!



It was a great end to a great week!

 

{Elves, Gingerbread Men, & Christmas Cheer}

 To get Christmas kicked off in Pre-K, we started by making number sentence Christmas trees. We choose balls and stars, and added them to our tree. Then we added a number sentence below. These were a hit, so we might do more of these in the future!

 Pre-K 1 started getting our Elves hats ready since we talked about Elves. We even had a visit from our own classroom Elf, who we named Thompson!

 

Here's one of our elves.

 And here's a mischievous elf.

 Throughout the week Thompson left us goodies and evidence of his shenanigans. Silly elf! First, he brought us a Pete the Cat Christmas book, which we loved!!

 

One day we found him relaxing in a tub of marshmallows. Oh, Thompson. 

 After all that relaxing, he was well rested and ready to be naughty, so he made a big mess! Our kids weren't too happy about the mess. It was funny!

 After so much elf shenanigans, we got busy making our own elves. Below are some of the most adorable elves ever drawn. For real.

 I want them to pop right off the page!

Pre-K 2 made Santas at art. Someone needed to be in charge of all those elves!

 

  

Pre-K 2 also made a mini reader about Christmas.

 And then they read it together!

 Pre-K 1 worked on making stacking reindeer.

 They ended up looking kind of like otters, but they were still really cute.

 Here they are! Rudolph is on the bottom, as you can see by the red nose.

 I also found this awesome free printable from Freebielicious. If you teach Pre-K-1st grade, you should check out this blog. It's awesome-sauce as my 12 year old would say. ;) Anyways, it was a editable list that I added sight words to and they had to roll and write our sight words. Really cute!

 

Speaking of sight words, we have been doing a LOT of reading, especially predictable text with high frequency words. They love reading books that they know the words or can use pictures to make picture to text connections. We have still been sounding out simple books, too, but I let them choose what to take home, and they generally choose the books that they feel are "easy" which is just fine! I'm happy to see them so excited about reading. :)

 

 In math both classes colored this sweet Christmas light patterning sheet. It's also free if you want a copy, you can find it here.

 Next, up, Gingerbread!!

There was a LOT of gingerbread cuteness going around. Here's just a few:

 

Pre-K 2 worked to make torn gingerbread people at art.

They also worked on a gingerbread math sheet, matching gingerbread boys and numbers.

 

Pre-K 1 did lots of gingerbread table top games. Gingerbread matching...

 Decorating gingerbread houses...

 gingerbread alphabet matching...

 and gingerbread patterning out of an old border set I cut into pieces.

 

In Pre-K 1, Thompson and his gingerbread friend left us everything we needed to make gingerbread cookies!

 So we did! They didn't turn out the way we thought, but not all things go as planned in life, and in Pre-K. We ended up making round cookies and they were still good. :)

 I love this picture of one sweet pea taking the ginger around for everyone to smell. They loved smelling the ginger, cloves, allspice and cinnamon.

 Pre-K 2 actually made gingerbread men! They formed their own men and they were super cute. But, don't you know it, their gingerbread men ran away right out of the oven!

But, they left a string of notes behind!

  

Thankfully, they finally returned to Pre-K 2, but they were soon eaten!

 

 Afterwards, Pre-K 2 did a Gingerbread glyph.

 They turned out really cute, too!

This week we also read some really great books. Here's just a few.

Merry Christmas!