CHRISTMAS SCHOOL!!!!
So this afternoon I kicked the kids out of the schoolhouse and locked the door! They are not allowed back in until December 2nd!! When they come in on December 2nd they will see that it has been transformed into Christmas School!!!! :-) I had so much fun decorating and getting it all ready!!
It has taken a couple of weeks to get everything planned out and I am so excited!
First off - I purchased Truth in the Tinsel and am so excited!! I have adapted it to work for our schools days (we have 12 school days before Christmas break) and have figured out some other activities to do as well.
I purchased an advent calendar - actually this is the one that the kids picked out.
To make it go with Truth in the Tinsel I used label sheets cut up to stick over what they have so that we could put our verses and pictures... as seen on one of the windows below.
We are going to do the ornament templates (and we will be making a few of the ornament crafts as well). So I printed out templates for each kid, colored copies of the picture clues and notes to go with the scripture readings and put them in an envelope for each day. Here they are all ready in a Christmas basket, along with our bible.
You will see in the next few pictures the tinsel that is hanging around the room. I thought I would take Truth in the TINSEL literally and we will be hanging our ornaments we make on tinsel. I went to the dollar store and got 3 different colors of tinsel (so each child will know which one is their's) and hung them up on one side of the room. Each day when they color and cut out their ornament we will attach it to their tinsel. (So by Christmas their tinsel will tell the Christmas story)
This is a view from the door of the whole room but you can see some of the tinsel on the right upper side of the picture.
It's hard to get everything photographed - I didn't get a good picture of showing all the tinsel stretching from one side of the room to the other.
So - here are some other school stuff that I we are doing special for Christmas!!!
I am so excited about our read aloud for December - we are reading a book I remember as a child - "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever". We will be finishing up Charlotte's Web the first week of December (and we have so so enjoyed it) and then we will read this one!
I made several Christmas packets for the kids to work on for Christmas. The first one are their verse tracings! For Thanksgiving I did thanksgiving verses where I wrote the verse with a highlighter and then they traced them - Seth doing cursive and Aaron and Alyssa doing print! This worked really well! (especially for Alyssa - I was so proud with how well she traced her letters. For Aaron and Seth I thought it would be a good change of pace for practicing their handwriting and cursive). Since it went so well for Thanksgiving I decided to do the same thing for Christmas! Their verses each day are from our scripture readings from Truth in the Tinsel for that day.
Here is the cover I made for each one of them.
Here is an example of Seth's cursive tracings.
Here is an example of Aaron's print tracings.
And here is an example of Alyssa's tracings. You will notice her letters are bigger and it is not the full verse...just enough for her to practice tracing her letters. :-)
I have really been working on trying to get Seth to write more. We have been working on fun short creative writings. I thought it would be fun to do some Christmas stories and found a great resource on teacherspayteachers.com. I decided to make Aaron a copy too and see what he can come up with!!
Here is the cover...
And here is one of the pages...
I also made special math packets for December! I decided to find some Christmas themed worksheets that would be review for what Aaron is learning. For Seth, we will be introducing multiplication and working on 2 and 3 times table with fun Christmas worksheets!!
Both of their covers look like this...
Here are some pages from Seth's book...
And here is a page from Aaron's book.
And I also made packets for the boys that were just fun activity pages - mazes, dot to dot, word searches, coloring sheets, etc...
I even made Alyssa a book of fun worksheets for her to work on! Letter tracings, dot to dot, what is different/what is the same worksheets, color by number, etc...
We will still be doing our normal reading lessons! I want to stay on track with them, especially since Aaron is scheduled to finish his 1st grade reading on December 16th!!! (remember he started in January last year with 1st grade reading). He is so excited!!! He was jumping up and down at the library the other day because I was getting him 2nd grade level books and some of them were chapter books!
Here are some more pictures of other decorations I have done around the room!
Here is the white board above my desk!
Here is a view of the big white board. You can't tell in the picture well but those are jingle bells strung across the top. There are ornaments down each side as well.
Here is a close up of my Santa - he is hanging in the middle of the white board! I thought he was quite appropriate for the school room. :-)
Also I put up around the room the handprint Christmas trees that the kids all made at church last year as my Christmas gift :-). Here is Aaron's...
Here is our angel sitting in the window (which is covered right now so that there are no peelers!)
Here is our truth in the tinsel basket with a couple of goodies in front of it...
A basket of fun Christmas erasers...
and a mug of fun Christmas pencils, sharpened and ready to use!
Here is a cute sign on the door!
And this is not Christmas - it is just our good 'ol Scentsy warmer - but it will be filled with Christmas scents making the room smell like Christmas!!!
I think it will be a very fun month of school!!
Until next time,
Kellie
