Elves

Tuesday morning, when we went into circle time an elf was sitting on a shelf with a book.  Everyone was so excited to see an elf had come to school!!  We read the story and then we needed to name our elf.  Each child shared a name that they thought would be just right for our elf.  The top three winners were Freddy, Sparkle, and Berry.  We decided to put them all together and name our elf Freddy Sparkleberry!  During activity time we made "elf hats".

On Wednesday, Freddy Sparkleberry was in the quiet activity room sitting on a window ledge.  He had red velvet cupcakes that he brought to share with the kids for snack!  It was a nice day so we had a chance to get outside and play for awhile.  Inside we heard several Christmas stories, and during activity time made an elf project out of the letter E.  We also had spinning tops and dreidels  to play with as well as play dough with Christmas cookie cutters.

After quiet activity time on Thursday we went on an elf hunt.  We looked in all of the rooms downstairs and couldn't find Freddy.  Finally we found him sitting under a tree in the media room.  He was sitting on top of a present!!  We opened it up and there was a wooden baking set for us to use in our play kitchen!  During activity time some of us chose to play with this.  We also traced over the lowercase letters of the alphabet, and played with cars and kinetic sand. We read a story called "The Twelve Days of Christmas".  It was a take off of the traditional version.  Instead of having a partridge in a pear tree it had a party in a pear tree.  When we got to the eighth day there were 8 elves baking!!  That's why Freddy brought us the baking set....he likes to help Santa bake cookies!!  The holiday spirit is all over our classroom....hope your houses are filled with it too!

The Gingerbread Man

We started the week hearing the story The Gingerbread Man.   We had fun chanting along with the story saying, "Run, run, as fast as you can, You can't catch me, I'm the Gingerbread Man!"  At the end of the story, to develop our reading comprehension, we tried to remember everyone who was chasing the Gingerbread Man. It might be fun to see if your child can still remember!!  (a little old lady, a little old man, a dog, cat, cow). Ask your child what happened to the Gingerbread Man at the end of the story!  Of course we had to have Gingerbread Men for a snack!  Mrs. Chyko was home sick with a cough so Mrs. Jenkins helped out all morning.  We had an extra long music time as we're starting to get ready for our Holiday Show.  During activity time we used gingerbread stencils to make our own gingerbread people and we decorated foam gingerbread cut outs using glitter glue and other decorations.

Wednesday we read The Gingerbread Baby.  It's similar to the Gingerbread Man but the Gingerbread cookie comes out of the oven 3 minutes early; so it's a baby!  This story is written by Jan Brett and has wonderful illustrations.  Here is a link to her website...there are nice activities for kids to interact with on this site.  http://www.janbrett.com/index.html

We had gingerbread babies for snack today and looked through a lot of new books about Christmas which have been added to our classroom library. This month we have kinetic sand  in our sensory tub. We also have gingerbread cookie cutters and gingerbread playdough, Lincoln Logs so the kids can build their own gingerbread houses and at the art table we started decorating  gingerbread houses.  

Thursday we had an ABC dot to dot we could choose to work on first thing in the morning.  During circle time we heard Gingerbread Friends.  Both of these Jan Brett stories had chants that the children joined along with during the read aloud.  We also learned a fingerplay about 5 Little Gingerbread Men during circle time.  For snack we had two gingerbread men connected together....gingerbread friends. We've been practicing our spanish during snack time and have been saying "si, por favor" instead of yes please and gracias instead of thank you.  Mr. Fleming came in and taught us how to say Merry Christmas (Feliz Navidad).  He also asked each one of us what we wanted for Christmas in Spanish and we had to reply to him in Spanish!!  (he helped everyone with the words).  During activity time, we finished our Gingerbread Houses, played with magnetic tiles, cars, kinetic sand, blocks, and gingerbread play dough.