December is here

December is finally here!  The cold weather and Christmas music is starting to get me excited for the month to come!  We have just started to get in the Holiday mood with winter and Christmas themed books and projects.  Before Thanksgiving we did a Reader's Theater performance for our parents.  One of the scripts was Click, Clack, Moo: Cows that Type (which they thought was hilarious) so naturally we had to read Click, Clack, HO! HO! HO!

 

This is a great story to work with order of events.  First, Duck gets stuck.  Then, all the farm animals get stuck behind him.  They also have to think of a clever way to get the animals out of the chimney.

To make the chimney we talked specifically about drawing the bricks. I think they really got the hang of it.

I'm sure the animals would enjoy their tails being pulled ;-)

Click on the link to take you to my TPT store to get this activity!

Also, we did a quick activity to extend our Kindness Challenge from Blair Turner.  Fun In First had the cutest idea for  sharing ways to be kind.  Since we have been working with weekly challenges all year this was a great way for us to write about a way we could be kind to others.  Some of them used ideas that we had done earlier this year, but some came up with totally new ways to show kindness.

I love how it 'lights up' or hallway.

Beginning of the Year

So September came and went before I even noticed!  We have been BUSY, BUSY in our classroom lately learning all our new routines. My favorite new routine has to be our Kindness Challenge.  I stumbled across it on Instagram this summer and instantly knew we had to try it out this year.  

Every week we flip the card to see what our "challenge" will be for the week.  It is a great way to start a discussion about different ways to be kind to one another.  

This week I found a great book in our book order "What Does it Mean to be Kind".  It was a sweet little story about things that you can do to be kind to others.  

Today our challenge was:

It could be my favorite challenge to date because the class did a great job interviewing each other to find out 5 new things about each other.  After they were done we all sat in a circle with our partner and shared one thing we learned.  

We have also been doing all things Apple (in September) and love these activities by Linda Kamp.

We do a lot of acrostic poems at the beginning of the year because the kid get the hang of them quickly and they always turn out cute.  

We also learned a little bit about each other by making Tree-Mendous Things About Me