Another day... and some sweet little elves

We are heartbroken. We are speechless. We too are mourning. For those sweet little lives that were taken a lifetime too soon. We mourn for their families, and friends, and anyone who was touched by this awful tragedy. We hugged our own kids tighter, and felt blessed for what we have, and who we have to go home to at the end of the day. We keep in our thoughts Sandy Hook, and educators everywhere who will now have to have some tough conversations, and answer some tough questions. We know we are. But, today is now another day. And although we are still heartbroken, and still speechless, and still mourning, we have vowed to do everything in our power to move ahead for our own sweet first graders. And we thank God for who we have to go to school for in the morning. Bless those little babies who are watching over us now. xoxo

This week we are wrapping up our Christmas season at school. We had meant to share this with you this weekend, but...  So, better late than never. Hopefully you still have some time to use these fun activities, or just save them for next year.  We started with Rudolph this year, and make sure to check out our freebies from {LAST YEARS POST}. The Rudolph art project is one of our favs!


 For the kids Christmas gifts for their parents, we made these sweet snowman ornaments.


We paint the kids hands (using white acrylic paint with a tiny bit of glue mixed in really helps it stick to the ornament) and then have them grasp the ornament. Their fingers are then turned into snowmen, using wither sharpies or puff paint. We spray on clear adhesive (glitter looks amazing!), add a ribbon with a little poem tag, and they're done! We also attach the kids sticker picture to the back. Here is the sweet little poem:

These aren’t just 5 snowmen,
As anyone can see.
I made them with my hand
Which is a part of me.
Now each year when you trim the tree
You’ll look back and recall,
Christmas of 2012
When my hand was just this small!
  
Click {here} if you'd like a copy of the ornament tags to print out. 

And we are rounding out the week with our adorable elf activities. We started out by reading this sweet little story, The Littlest Elf


We then filled out these sweet little elf applications that we found at What The Teacher Wants. We had to reformat to make it all fit on one page. If you'd like a copy, you can find it {here}.

The next step is to make these FANTASTIC little elves we created. Are they just to die for?



If you'd like a copy of the master, find it {here}. We will use the hole punches to cut out the little circles, and they will draw their own circle for the hat. The leg stripes were colored in marker. Everything else is there. We will then put it all together, and just add a picture of the kids in the elf hat.



Here is my own little elf model for the picture of the elf hat. Please ignore the teeth! He's lost 4 recently, and is looking kinda silly. :-) 
 
 


If you still are looking for some math and literacy activities for winter time, make sure to check out these two units!  Click on the pictures to see them at our store.We hope you have a wonderful last week with the first graders. Hug them all tight!




 

We're all about treasures around here

Hope you are all having a fabulous start to December!  We just absolutely LOVE this time of year!  We  have just finished trimester one with our kiddos and are ready to start trimester two! We've got a busy 3 weeks ahead of us before winter break.  Creating games for our school's first winter carnival, helping our kiddos create gifts for  their families on Christmas, and incorporating our Gingerbread Math & Literacy Unit {you can check it out here} into our plans, are just a few of the many items on our LONG to do lists!  We'll share more about these later this month!  
Now on to our literacy block, and if you teach reading using Treasures, then you'll definitely want to keep reading this post!  Since our kiddos go to literacy centers everyday (click here to see how we do literacy centers) while we meet with small groups, we decided we'd create a center called "Paper Practice".  This center often contains practice book pages and grammar worksheets.  We've also created our own practice sheets based on the weekly sight words found in Treasures.  This center contains at least 3 different "worksheet" type activities.  Our students visit this center twice throughout the week, so we like to have a variety of "paper" activities for them to choose from.  We also have a word work center where our students practice their weekly treasures spelling words using magnets, play-dough, scrabble tiles, Wikki Stix, etc...  This center is mostly hands on and contains weekly spelling word lists for our kiddos to read while creating words.  We also have 4 other centers: listening (with ipods), computers, writing, and reading.     
If you're looking for paper practice activities for your first graders, then you'll definitely want to check out our latest addition to our store. 

   This set of First Grade Paper Practice Activities contains:

•Letter Cards (capital, lowercase, & 6 beginning and final blends)

•Spelling List Template

•Spelling Lists (on level words for each week)

•Read, Write, Make worksheet using High Frequency Words
(for each week)

•Roll a Sight Word worksheet using High Frequency Words
(for each week)

•Rainbow Words worksheet using High Frequency Words
(for each week)

•Two Beginning Blend Worksheets (week 4)

•Two Final Blend Worksheets (week 4)

•End of Unit Memory Cards
(all high frequency words and on level spelling words from unit 1)

•3 End of Unit Word Searches
(all high frequency words and on level spelling words from unit 1)

Stop on by our TpT store and you can check it out {HERE}!

We've also got a few freebies for you as well!  We are just loving the Treasures teaching charts and definitely love to display them on our SMART boards and make the lessons more interactive.  We've made cards to match some of the phonics/fluency teaching charts.  We use these cards when we meet with our small groups.  Our kids sort the words, practice reading them, and rebuild the sentences.  We have made teaching chart word cards for each week in unit 1.  Just click the links below!  







We're always looking for new ideas and we'd love to hear what you do for word work and/or paper practice types of centers.  If you'd like to share, please comment below!  
Hope you all have a great week!