Christmas Rewind!

First off, I hope you all had a *wonderful* Christmas! We definitely got spoiled this year and enjoyed lots of delicious meals and family company. But now I finally have some time to share a few of the festivities that went on in our classroom the few crazy days before Christmas break. Here we go!

We are still focusing on descriptive writing, and those of you who have been reading along for a while now will probably remember the descriptive writing guessing game that my firsties participated in last year. Well, it was such a hit that I brought it back for another round!

First we "decorated" a simple Christmas tree template, making sure to add lots of unique details. Then we put our descriptive writing skills to the test and wrote a detailed description of our trees.

Then for the fun part! I hung up all of their trees and read each description one by one. After each description, the kiddies had to guess which tree matched the description. 

I still love this activity because it really helps drive home how important it is to be specific with their descriptions, but also to help them understand what types of details are important to include. They did an awesome job; most descriptions and trees were matched on the first guess!

You can download the tree template and writing paper by clicking HERE or either picture below:

This year I edited the template to include dotted printing lines so if you'd prefer the version below, click HERE.

My kids love centres so we also spent lots of time the last few days working through some fun and engaging (and purposeful) centres. 

What originally began as me creating a few purposeful but festive centre activities to use the last week of school, quickly turned into an entire Print-and-Go worksheet pack for Christmas and winter (with 10 math and 10 literacy activities)...so basically 5 minutes of work turned into a few hours haha Story of my life! But I'm so excited with the result:

(Click HERE in order to view each worksheet up close by using your zoom)

We used just about every activity from this pack throughout the week (so they have all been kid-tested and enjoyed!) and I was so excited to see how engaged my firsties were. Seriously, this amount of focus the last week of school before Christmas break completely shocked me:

My firsties ROCK!!! P.S. how stinkin' cute are they in their PJs? Yes, this is the LAST DAY and they're all working their little booties off. Thank you, Santa!

Anyways, I usually put out 2 math and 2 literacy activities each time and always had a few just-for-fun "fast finisher" activities that the kids could grab and bring back to their centre to work through until it was time to visit another centre.

I just printed off a bunch of these colour-by-number pages that I found through Pinterest HERE: 

There's also a TON of cute (and free!) printable activities over at Activity Village that I've used for the same purpose. 

If you'd like to check out the Print and GO! No Prep Math & Literacy Worksheet Pack for Christmas and Winter in more detail, click HERE :)

And that about wraps up our whirlwind of a week! I am still in shock that Christmas has already come and gone...slow down, time! 

I hope you all have a fantastic New Years :)

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Science & Writing FREEBIES!

Happy Saturday! 

I'm just popping in to share two fun FREEBIES with ya'll today. 

This first one has been highly requested so let's start off with a Science freebie!

We've been learning all about Daily & Seasonal Changes and had a bit of fun with this activity:

I hand-drew these adorable little creatures based on one of Pixar's animated short films, Day and Night. If you've never seen it, check it out...it's too cute!!

We watched this during our Daily & Seasonal Changes unit in Science. One of the curriculum expectations is to understand that "changes occur in daily and seasonal cycles" by "assess(ing) the impact of daily and seasonal changes on living things." This video sums up our learning PERFECTLY!

So anyways, the kiddies could either choose a scene from the film or create their own scene depicting the differences between day and night and the various activities that can take place during each. Let me tell you, they were *all about* this activity. 

Click the pic below to download your copy!

I use this last freebie during our descriptive writing unit and the kids LOVE it! I've never seen them more engaged in a writing activity:

After reading one Robert Munsch's (LOVE him!!) infamous books, 

we wrote down all the words we could think of to describe poor Thomas' snowsuit. Then, we dragged our own snowsuits into the classroom to get to work! The kiddies got to colour their snowsuit first, and then we wrote our descriptive writing pieces to match. 

(UPDATED 15/03/2016: this activity has since been updated and is now included in my Writing Focus #3: Descriptive Writing pack)

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And if you haven't yet noticed, we are already almost one full MONTH into 2014!! Which means love is in the air, and Valentine's day is right around the corner! If you're looking for some engaging and authentic literacy & literacy center activities for February, have a peek at my newest product:

(To get a better description of what's included, you can click the pic above or right HERE!)

I hope you enjoy the freebies! Have a great weekend, everyone!

Merry Christmas!

School is officially OUT for Christmas break!!! 

Here's a peek at some of the festivities from the last 2 weeks:

For our parent gifts this year, I picked up dollar-a-glass wine glasses and a set of paint markers from Walmart to personalize gifts for moms and dads:

To go along with our glasses, we made these adorable little thumbprint ornaments cards:

All of our literacy centres were of course holiday-themed. At Word Work 1 we played this editable sight word board game:

At Word Work 2 we played a simple sight word Memory game:

At Pocket Chart, the kids sorted sight words by the number of letters:

We are working on descriptive writing right now, so I decided to do a fun descriptive guessing game with the kids. First we decorated a christmas tree template (which I found HERE by googling) and then we described our trees using lots of "5W" details:

After that, I hung up all of the trees and read the descriptions out loud one by one. The kids got to guess which tree I was describing by matching the description to the correct tree. They were totally engaged. This was actually a great activity to help the kids understand how a great description can really help us to understand a writer's vision:

(6 drawings weren't hung up yet...if only I had just 14 kids in my class! hehe)

(Click the pic above to download your FREE copy of the writing paper and tree template!)

We also did this adorable dot art craft:

Their artwork turned out JOYfully ;)

On the last day of school, we had a PJ and Polar Express-themed day. We obviously read this book:

And, after reading the book, we made our very own Polar Express trains with chalk:

(I wish I took more pictures because they all turned out SUPER cute!)

At the end of the very end of this insanely chaotic month, we took a moment to watch the Polar Express and enjoy way too much popcorn and sweets. What a fun day! 

And now for a much-needed 2 weeks of relaxation. Bring it on!!!

Merry Christmas, everyone!