At the beginning of December we read the book, "The Biggest Christmas tree ever" by Steven Kroll. If you've never read it before, it's about two mice who fall in love with the same tree. It's a great book to teach character perspective, which is what we worked on in December. After reading it, my students discussed how everyone thinks their Christmas Tree is the biggest and best and how perspective and point of view plays into your opinions. They then created their own Christmas trees!
This was my favorite project we did this December. I found these on a website online and just loved them. The directions are here. We learned all about the birth of Jesus and then created these beautiful stain glass nativity scenes. We hung them in our windows so that everyone could enjoy them!
I love their little hands holding them up to the light.
We also created an advent chain that we hung in the window too. We learned all about the four weeks of advent and what they stood for. I then handed out three purple and one pink strips of paper to each kid. They had to write four different ways they were going to prepare for the birth of Jesus. We attached all the pieces together and created a chain that hung throughout the three huge windows into my classroom. It reminded us throughout the month to ready our hearts for his coming.
Here you can see the pinecone Christmas trees that we created as one of the two gifts we made our Parents for Christmas. Attached to the tree we tied Diamante poems. You can see an example of one of the ones the kids wrote below.
The poem was a great way to review parts of speech! They had to include 2 nouns, 4 adjectives, 6 verbs and one phrase about Christmas time.
The other gift we created was a Christmas cookbook. Each child wrote a recipe for something they love that their parents make them for dinner. It was a complete secret and they had to write the recipe from memory. It was great way to practice writing directions in proper sequence. It was also wonderful to see their interpretation of what their parents did to make them food. We took all of their recipes and bound them into a book that they gave their on Christmas morning.
Chocolate Cursive! At my new school cursive is taught starting in January of Second grade. My partner teacher, Lisa, and I decided to get out some of those pre-Christmas break wiggles by practicing cursive strokes in chocolate pudding. The kids loved it! What a great Hook to start learning cursive!
We also worked with adjectives in December. We added them to our writing to paint vivid pictures in our readers' heads and even created our own Christmas Adjective tree to spruce up our classroom for the Holidays. (wink* wink* pun intended!) Each child created their own adjective ornament.
In the last week of school before break, we had two parties. We celebrated as a class with our room moms and also celebrated with our fifth grade buddies. Our fifth grade buddies helped us make Nutter Butter reindeer while we watched a Christmas song sing-a-long video. Some of them turned out super cute. Unfortunately, most of them were eaten before I had a chance to snap a picture.
During our class party, our room moms helped us create these adorable donut snowmen too! Who doesn't love eating adorably made Christmas snacks!? Can't wait to make the snowmen again next year! They were delicious :D.
In Math we worked on Multiplication. We used m&m's and cheerios to create arrays and make equal groups to learn multiplication.
We then created these adorable Christmas lights to practice and memorize our 2's times tables.
December was such a busy Month! We also celebrated our First Reconciliation! I love getting to be a part of their overall preparation for the sacraments. It's so special! Our school requires that we test their memorization of the Act of Contrition. The picture above shows how nervous they were for it! I found this paper in our turn in box. So adorable!
Finally, my students worked on Character perspective in the month of December. We culminated our study by creating our own stories. The kids chose to write the story of Rudolph the Red nosed reindeer from either Santa or Rudolph's perspective. We practiced using personal pronouns and adjectives in our writing. When they finished every step of the Writing Process and were ready to "publish" it (Hang it on our wall), they were given the chance to create these cuties to hang with their writing. They made my classroom so festive!
Hope you and your family had a great Holiday! <3
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