Christmas Greetings

This is a little Christmas video I made of the students to wish everyone a Merry Christmas!

Christmas Performance

We have been working very hard on our Christmas performance in music.  Monday night we had our musical at the high school.  The students were very excited to sing on the big stage.  They all did a wonderful job!  While helping backstage I managed to snap a few photos.

I hate that I didn't get a picture of everyone in their Christmas clothes.  Everyone looked so nice!

North Pole Invasion

Last week we had a new arrival from the North Pole!  

There have been elves from the North Pole popping up all over school.  The students asked where was my elf and I explained how I had never had one before.  After investigating all the elves close by, we were beginning to feel left out.  So...we wrote a letter to three of the elves in nearby classrooms and hand delivered them.  We asked those elves to PLEASE ask Santa to send us an elf for our classroom.  The next morning we had a surprise delivery in the office from the North Pole!  Mrs. Pennington delivered this beautiful basket to our room.

Squeals of excitement could be heard all the way down the hall.  We enjoyed a special North Pole breakfast of snow covered donuts, kisses from Santa, and Reindeer kisses from Rudolph and the other reindeer.  We named him Speedy.  The students have been super excited to spot the elf each day.

Little Indians

On Tuesday we made indian hats and wore them all day.  We decorated our hats with different indian symbols.  We made pinecone turkeys and listed things we are thankful for on the feathers.  We made bracelets with colored beads to tell the Thanksgiving story.  We also learned about how the Native Americans helped the Pilgrims on the first Thanksgiving.  We learned about Squanto and enjoyed a Squanto inspired snack.  Here's a video of our day!

I hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving!

Little Pilgrims

We had some fun holiday inspired activities these past two school days.  On Monday we made our pilgrim hats and wore them all day.  They were a huge hit!  Everything is more fun with a pilgrim hat on.  :)


For math we had a probability lesson.  We had 1 green, 2 red, and about 5 brown turkeys in our bag.  We pulled 10 turkeys out of the bag and tallied our results.  We then discussed our results.  Here are a few pictures.

Matthew & Elias

Mary-Caroline & Taylor

 Hannah & Jillian

 Lew & Ryland

 Alex & Elijah

Rufus & David

In reading workshop we learned about author's purpose and read a book about pilgrims.  Then my little pilgrims read from their leveled books.  Here are a few pictures of the awesome pilgrim readers.

We also made a cute Thanksgiving magnet to take home for the refrigerator.  I hope they all made it home safe and sound.

Here's Victoria working on her magnet!

We also made the cutest pilgrim boys and girls and wrote about things for which we are thankful.  Here are some pictures of the groups making the pilgrims.

The Red Group

 The Orange Group

 The Yellow Group

 The Green Group

 The Purple Group

The Blue Group

Here are a few of the finished pilgrims!

 Elijah

 Jackson

 Taylor

Victoria

Emily's

Ella's

Victoria's

Trevor's

Jackson's

Last thing that day we had a Thanksgiving inspired snack.  We made cupcake teepees.  They were so tasty!  Everyone enjoyed eating a little snack.  Here's a video of the pictures.

Voting Treat

We have had a little more election fun!  As we learned about what a ballot is and how you mark your choice, I gave the students something fun on which to vote.  Each student got a ballot and voted on push-up or Popsicle.  We then tallied the class votes to find a winner.  This gave us a chance to learn what majority means.  Popsicle was the majority vote, so we enjoyed this tasty treat on Tuesday.  Here are a few pictures.

Class Election

In Social Studies, we have been learning about how to vote.  To make our learning more hands-on we held a class election to find a class president.  Then that president got to make a decision for all of us.  To begin we made election posters.  Here are our election posters.  They turned out awesome!  These "firsties" are so creative!

Rufus, David, & Maxwell

Lance, Hannah, Elijah, & Emily

Ryland, Alex, Victoria, & Xavier

Lynli & Mary-Caroline

Lew, Jackson, Ella, & Jillian

Trevor, Elias, Benjamin, Aubrey, & Taylor

Everyone presented their posters to the class and gave an election speech.  I must say, they all had great reasons why they would be a great class president.  Then we setup our voting booths to turn our room into the poll.  Each child took a ballot and voted for who they thought should be our new class president.

Meet Mr. PRESIDENT!

Trevor won by a landslide!  I guess the gumball machine worked like a charm.  Everyone enjoyed a gumball from our new class president.  He then got several choices as he made a big decision for the rest of the class.  He got to choose from: a trip to the treat box for everyone, free learning stations, or extra recess.  As he chose extra recess, the class cheered!