Merry Christmas One and All!

On the last day before winter vacation began, we had a little party to celebrate the season.  Thanks to Angel, who brought in treats to share with the class.  We also had little cuties, apple juice boxes, hershey kisses, skittles and red and green MnMs.  We played sight word bingo with our MnMs and we had enough time to get in 5 winners!  One of the special surprises was hats-Mrs. Rudd made.

Everyone was surprised and our friends throughout the building loved seeing our hats!  The boys' hats had snakes on them and the girls' hats had frogs and hearts on them.  Here are the directions for making the hats if you are interested:

1.  Cut fleece length-wise to go around circumfrence of the head of person to wear hat-most kids were about 20" in length X 18" deep.

2.  Turn fleece inside out and sew middle third of the hat closed with a straight seam.

3.  Double hat over keeping the seam inside and then cut straight strips down from the open end of the fleece about 4-5 inches long each.

4.  Tie fleece in double-knots.

and viola!  You have your hat.

A special thank you to Mrs. Z-(my son's teacher) who originally made them with her class!



Our Christmas Tree Creation

During the first week of December, Robinson had a schoolwide contest to create a Christmas Tree with a Children's Literature Theme.  For our classroom, the children voted and the book they wanted to use was Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons.  Here is our tree:

We used interactive writing(without sharing the pen)-teacher and students typing while students dictating on the smartboard to think through our beginning, middle and end of the story.  Then, we printed them out and added the sequence to the tree.  Everyone colored their own buttons and garland to add to the tree.  Last, we printed out the cover and added the trunk.  Most people liked our tree.  The winning tree was created by the students in 108 who used non-fiction stories about stars to decorate their tree.