Gingerbread & Christmas Stuff

Okay…still SO behind…but here are just a couple of things we’ve been working on! 

We’re still going strong with fact families, so I had my kids make fact family gifts. They rolled dice to get the numbers to add together for the sum.  I also had them roll the dice twice and add those numbers together to practice working with higher numbers.  As you can see, they made their own bows…but real bows would have been a great “addition” too! ;)

 

Speaking of gifts, this is one of my most FAVORITE writing activities.  I started doing this my third year of teaching and have been doing it ever since!  I think it’s so precious and sweet and really gets the kids thinking about non-material gifts.  I used to read the book, Crispin The Pig Who Had It All {I ADORE this book!!!}, but unless you have $189 to shell out on a new version of this story, GOOD LUCK finding it!!  HA!!!  This year I read this book…

For a little reader’s response, I had the kids write about the best gift of all…and it couldn’t be anything store bought!  I love, love, LOVE reading their responses!!  One of my little guys wrote, The best gift of all is my family and the LORD.  Melt. my. heart.

{I cut a class set of red rectangles….don’t know the dimensions…for the gift boxes and pre-cut the white gift wrap as well.  I cut a white piece of paper just a touch smaller than the red and told the kids to write their responses and draw their illustrations on that.  Then the kids assembled everything else themselves, making sure that the gift box lifted up so that we could peek underneath and read their writing.}

We’ve been working on a few little Gingerbread activities as well, but this is all I have pictures of so far!  We’re learning about long vowels and this week’s chunks were –ike, –ide, & –ine.  I programmed a bunch of little gingerbread men with the chunk words, cut them out, and placed them on a little cookie sheet.  I labeled three paper plates with the chunks and the kids got to use a spatula to move the Gingerbread from the baking sheet to the corresponding paper plate.  They are LOVING this activity!  They also had to record the chunk words on a recording sheet as they sorted. 

You can download your copy of this fun little activity right HERE!!!! {I included a sheet of blank Gingerbread men so you could write your own words inside their bellies!}

Here are a few little Gingerbread activities you can download as well!  Just click on the pictures for your copy!!

 

This could be used as a perimeter/estimation activity.  I used buttons for it!  I had the kids estimate the perimeter of each Gingerbread and then use buttons to make an accurate count.  We also talked about factors that would have made our counts different {using big/small buttons, etc.}  Click on the picture for your copy.