Busy Week

My oh my what a busy week!! So busy in fact It took me this long to post our exciting adventures!!

Monday we began the week with our Elf projects! We read: How to Catch an Elf and put our  creativity and STEM stills together to create some pretty awesome traps!

We even wrote about How To Catch our Elves

Next we went outside on Tuesday, there wasn’t a lot of snow but the kids had a blast- I was too cold to take pictures that day! 

PJ day Wednesday, and Grinch day!

This was a first for me and a favorite!! Another STEM challenge. 

After reading the book and doing some Grinch writing

I challenged the kids to create their own Grinch sled. They could make it any way they wanted with the materials provided: Paper, string, tape, glue, candy canes and a Grinch. The sled needed to make it both up and down Grinch Mountain without dropping 8 “gifts” (math cubes) It was so cool to see them crate and then revise their projects to make them better! 

Looking forward to to wrapping it up tomorrow with a music concert in the morning, our class party, centers, games and snacks! Happy Holidays and enjoy your family time! Thank you for the gift of your child! 

Directed Drawing Calendars

Spoiler 🚨 Alert this is one of our class parent Christmas gift this year- Directed Drawing Calendars!!! They turned out so cute I can’t stand it! A few teacher friends wanted directions, but families you could do this too,  what a fun homemade gift!

Here’s how I began, normally I do directed drawing through the year and match it to the theme or holiday this year we have been doing a lot of practice with following directions and directed drawing lends its self wonderfully.  

For each “month” I gave the kids a half sheet of white construction paper. I modeled the directions and drawing (I did it with them as they were doing it) they had to do it with pencil first ( this is important)

Next they got a thin black marker or sharpie and traced their pencil lines. Then they colored in the picture and finally they had to color in the background (no blank backgrounds allowed) the black marker and the crayons together really make a difference and coloring the background is important too, it makes it look a lot more finished. 

After all of the month drawings were complete I gave each student a (regular sized not large, I think it’s a 9x12??) construction paper. I had the kids glue the pictures on the top of each page. Then I found blank calendars (from a google search) I copied them to a word document and made it so there would be two on each page (half sheets) now if I had an aide, or help,  I would have loved to have laminated and cut them and bound them more neatly but this year I hole-punched two holes in the top and strung a ribbon through which still worked out great. 

As much as I love to plan things (think parties) I’m a spur of the moment girl too so I didn’t plan out the drawings way a head of time, I just looked on Pinterest and found ones I liked. I also found a lot that had step by step directions but I sort of winged it. I am pretty visual so I was able to draw and explain as I went and it worked out great, and if it didn’t we could erase - that’s why we used pencils, or scrapped it if needed, I only scrapped one, we originally made a reindeer for December but I didn’t like how it turned out so we changed it to a winterscape instead. 

Here are the drawings I chose for each month:

January- catching snowflakes

February- bee mine

March-leprechaun 

April- bunny

May- flowers 

June-ice cream cone

July- fireworks

August- beach scene

September- school bus

October- witch feet 

November- turkey

December- winter trees 

Here are a few finished drawings...

There are TONS of detailed directions and resources out there, I created a board on Pinterest too here is the link:

https://pin.it/yhrltt3rfpmp3j

Hope this helps inspire you and thanks for all of the love ❤️