Santa Clocks, a Letter to St. Nick, & My Favourite Christmas Stories

Happy December! Can you believe it?! I barely remember November even happening it seemed to fly by so quickly. But I'm definitely not complaining because this is my favourite time of year! We certainly wasted no time getting into the holiday spirit with fun activities this week...and to celebrate, I have some festive freebies to share with you...

First up, Santa Clocks! 

We are beginning to wrap up our Telling Time unit in math and my firsties can now tell time to the hour and half hour. To introduce a little holiday cheer to our unit, we used my FREE template to create these adorable Santa Clocks (get it? Santa Clocks instead of Santa Claus? HA!).

I always love how unique their craftivities turn out. Each one is so different. 

The freebie below includes 3 different clock face options to help suit the needs of your students. 

Click the pic to download your copy!

Our literacy centre work this week featured activities from my editable Holiday Hoopla sight word pack. At our writing centre, the kiddies got to write a letter to Santa (which I will actually mail to Santa and we will receive our response in the near future...I can't wait!!). Again, this freebie includes 3 options to allow for super simple differentiation for your kiddies:

Click HERE or the pic to download!

Last but not least, if you follow me on Instagram you already know that I planned to share some of my favourite children's Christmas books with you all! So without further adieu, here's what tops my list every holiday season:

God Gave Us Christmas

The Polar Express

Santa Mouse, Where Are You? 

(I can no longer find the above pictured "All Aboard Books" version online, but I'm assuming the one linked is the same story)

How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

The Little Crooked Christmas Tree

A Christmas Wish for Corduroy

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer 

(I loved this version growing up but just about any version of this classic is great!)

Pippin the Christmas Pig

Howard B. Wigglebottom and the Power of Giving: A Christmas Story

 

The Night Before Christmas

Merry Christmas, Mom and Dad

...And I don't often share personal pictures on here but I just can't resist sharing our first glimpse of our little peanut with you! 

Ultrasounds are just way too cool...plus I can boastfully say that there is quite the cutie cooking in my tummy ;) Happy First Weekend of December!

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Happy Fall Ya'll!

Ohmyword the leaves around are BE.U.TIFUL here! I *love* fall...if only it would last all year! Check this out:

I wish I had a picture of some of the red trees around here...they're so bright they look like they're glowing. Amazing!

So needless to say, this week was the absolute perfect week for a fall literacy theme:

Every morning we read this poem:

We "I spied" colour words, clapped, tapped, winked, and jumped in place of number words, and found sight words in this poem. I love finding poems that hold so many learning possibilities!

In addition to our poem, we also focused on beginning and ending sounds this week (a key concept when it comes to emergent reading strategies). Throughout the week we built a list of fall vocabulary words, concentrating on just the beginning and ending sounds. Completing this simple group activity helped the kiddies decode the fall words that they would be encountering throughout our week's literacy centres.

Anyways, after our poem and fall vocabulary brainstorm, we moved to literacy centres. Here's a peek at some of our literacy centres this week:

At Word Work 1, the kiddies focused on stretching out each of their letter sounds in order to correctly spell fall vocabulary words. They had to pick out all of the cards with one specific picture and use their sounds to correctly arrange all of the letters and spell a word (ex: students find all of the letter cards with an apple in the corner, and arrange them to spell the word "apples").

Word Work 2 focused on ending sounds. The kiddies matched pictures to their correct ending sounds and recorded their answers on the worksheet.

Pocket Chart centre focused on beginning sounds. Students used the pictures on each leaf to help them read the unfinished words (words missing their beginning sounds) and match them to the correct beginning sound tree branch.

At the end of one day, we happened to read this sweet book:

The little squirrel is so confused by the leaves falling off the trees that he tries to gather them up and "fix" the trees. Throughout the week, the kiddies had a blast pretending to be the squirrel from our story while matching the leaves on to the trees. I *love* that they made that connection!

(How stinkin' cute is this little dude's hair?! I wish I could pull that off...haha!)

Next up, at Write the Room, the kids hunted around the room to match the fall pictures on their worksheet to those stuck on the walls around the classroom:

The above activities are from my Everything Autumn Write the Room Companion Pack. It features 5 different write the room activities for 5 different fall themes.

(you can click the pic below to see details of what's included) 

This product is featured on Teaching Blog Addict. Click the button below to visit the website and to check out tons of other fabulous fall freebies!

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Anyways, back to centres! My kiddies are still working hard on "writing the WHOLE time" at the Writing Centre. This a *very* tough skill for firsties to learn, especially coming out of the new play-based learning that significantly lacks the structure of first grade literacy centres. Anyways, I am so impressed with how far my kiddies have come just in this past week. We focused on the Writing Centre option of writing a letter this week. They got to write a letter to Mother Nature describing either a real or fictional fall story.

Last but not least, my kiddies are still using our Sight Word Wands to hunt for sight words in their guided reading books and other books they choose to read throughout their time at the Reading Centre. They get so excited when a sight word pops up. LOVE it!

And that about wraps it up...I hope you enjoyed getting a little peek at our week! Have a fabulous weekend, everyone :)