Category Archives: Christmas

Fun with The Elves!

Sparkles, our Elf on the Shelf and Gus, our resident ghost and trickster have been leaving surprises all month.  I decided to try to catch them in the act with the Santa Spy Cam app.  We caught Sparkles’ friends in the act!  You can see our classroom in the video! They left us a note!  Too much fun!  The Santa Spy Cam app is really cool.  Take a look at this app at the app store or online and see the amazing things that are possible with this app!

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 Here are a few of the treats left for us each day!

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The students seemed to really enjoy the visit from Sparkles and rushed to find out what she had left for us each day!  We will miss her!

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Filed under Christmas, Elf on the Shelf, Santa, Youtube

Santa and the Polar Express Day Fun!

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We had a great time on our Polar Express Day!  The day started off with a special visit from Santa!

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We had a great visit together!  He wanted to hear the song we did for the Christmas concert!

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We gave him one of our guitars and we sang the North Pole Rock and Roll song together!  Lots of fun!

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The other Grade One class joined us aboard the Polar Express with some very special Polar Express tickets!  We had a great time together.  We had hot chocolate with mini marshmallows and lots of amazing treats just like on the Polar Express.  Thank you to all the parents who helped supply all the goodies this time! The two groups gathered on the carpet to watch the movie The Polar Express in the afternoon.  It was a real treat to see it on our new Promethean board!

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Here is a picture of the very important mail we received from the North Pole!  Our buddies helped us write letters to Santa and our replies came to the school! Very exciting!

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Filed under Christmas, Polar Express, Promethean Board, Santa

Fun with Glitter and the Polar Express!

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We had a lot of fun creating our entry to the Christmas Door Decorating contest!  We made our own Polar Express!  The children colored their own boxcar for the train.  We love The Polar Express story written by Chris Van Allsburg.

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We added white glue to the rooftops of the boxcar and sprinkled white glitter on top.  Lots of fun!   The children added a photograph of themselves in one of the boxcar windows.

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We decided to paint the railroad tracks using black paint.  One of our rainy day classroom supervisors helped us finish the job!

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We love using glitter and made our Christmas light houses using white glue and red glitter.  The children drew little vignettes of the inside of their houses in the windows.  We also included another photograph of them in one of the windows!

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We will be using these houses as a special cover for a book we created about Christmas and the five senses.

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Take a peek!

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Glitter is a lot of fun!

 

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Christmas Fun!

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We have been having a great time making Christmas cards to send to 30 other classrooms from around the world.  We are taking part in the Holiday Card Exchange with over 1,100 other classes in the world.  This project is organized by a lovely lady in California named Jennifer Wagner. We have to make 30 cards and send them to the 30 names on our list.  We will be receiving cards back from all the names on our list!  We took part in this project last year and it was very exciting.  This year we have cards going to Kenya, New Zealand, and Japan.  We have cards going to five places in Canada, and lots of cards going to a large variety of places in the United States!

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Sparkles, our Elf on the Shelf is back this year and started her visit with a snowball fight with the dinosaurs in the classroom.  The snowballs were miniature marshmallows!  Of course,we had to eat up the marshmallows to prevent further fights.

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 She has been leaving treats for the children each day!

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 Sinterclaas paid a visit too!

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We are starting a new type of Brown Bag sharing over the next few weeks.  We will be sharing our favorite Christmas customs.  My family celebrates Sinterclass.  I brought my wooden shoes to school and taught the children a few words in Dutch.  That was enough to have our classroom become honorary Dutch citizens for the day and Sinterclaas paid a surprise visit!  He left some Dutch gingerbread, chocolate coins, pencils, and chocolate letters.  Very yummy!

 

 

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Filed under Christmas, Christmas Card Project, Elf on the Shelf

Fun with Elves!

We had a lot of fun  with elves this month!  We have Sparkles, our Elf on the Shelf who teamed up with Gus, our resident ghost mischief-maker working together to leave surprises for the children almost every day!  They left messages, puzzles, stickers, suggestions for stories to read, and sometimes special treats to eat!  I managed to catch them in the act using a special app called Santa Spy Cam!  They built a castle using the blocks in the classroom at our Christmas center and filled it with candycanes.   The video above is the evidence!

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We also filled out applications to become elves.  I sent them home for Christmas.  Hope you enjoyed them!

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We also had a surprise visit from Santa Claus!

He spent a long time visiting with the children and told us a lot about elves.  Apparently their favourite food is candycanes!

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There were a few elves in his sack that tried to get out but he managed to keep them hidden!

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Our Polar Express day was a lot of fun!  Thank you to everyone for supporting this day!  We made hot chocolate and had yummy cookies.  We used up the leftover graham crackers from the Gingerbread house building to make some S’mores!  Very yummy!

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We listened to the story first and then we each got a jingle bell just like in the story.  Luckily, no one had a hole in their pocket!

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We also danced to these two Christmas Just Dance Kids videos!  The Grade Sevens came to help us dance to the Santa one!

This is the Jingle Bells one!  Lots of fun!

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Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas!  Have a Happy New Year!

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Filed under Augmented Reality, Christmas, Dance, Elf on the Shelf

Christmas Tree Fun!

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We have been having fun using the Doodle Buddy app to draw Christmas trees.  This is a fun app to use!  The children are using the drawing tools, the stamp tools, and learning to use the text tool to add their names.  We have been saving our pictures to the camera roll and we are planning to import them into another app to create a Christmas tree book!

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These are just a few of the trees the students have created!  They love to draw on the iPad and everyone is eagerly waiting for their turn!

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We also made a Count up Christmas tree book today in between decorating gingerbread houses with our Big Buddies!

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They had fun adding the funky cover to their booklets!

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We have been having fun with our Christmas homework!  I couldn’t resist taking a picture of this cool gingerbread house that came this week! See the light inside?  I wish I had remembered to take pictures of all the other great things that came!  We have had some really cool stuff!  Angels, dancing gingerbread men, trains, stuffies, chocolates, books, and special ornaments to name just a few!  It is so interesting to hear how everyone celebrates the holidays!

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And then we made real gingerbread houses today!

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Don’t they look great! Too yummy!  I have to admit that I asked to taste some of the Chocolate Kisses!!  Hope all the houses made it home in one piece!

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Filed under Buddies, Christmas, Doodle Buddy

Christmas Card Fun!

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We made Christmas cards this week for a special project that we are taking part in this year!  It is called by Holiday Card Exchange Project which matches us with 29 other schools across the continent of North America.  It is part of a variety of projects coordinated by Jennifer Wagner’s Projects by Jen.  We are sending cards to a variety of places in the United States as well as one other school in Canada in Ontario.  Our cards are going all over the United States.  We send one card to each of the schools on our list and they send us a card back!  We will be mapping out where our cards originate.  A fun way to learn more about the world.  I will try to find pictures about each of the places our cards come from!  The theme of the cards was supposed to be Mittens, Caps, and Scarfs.  We focused on the mittens.

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We had to write about one interesting fact about our school and some of the details about our class!  The children brainstormed some ideas and then chose their favorites to include in the card.  We had to include some details about our school and classroom as well as the average temperature in Nanaimo on December 15th.

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I found a special punch that lets us punch out snowflakes to add to our cards.  It was a huge hit!

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I mailed the cards on Friday and hopefully we will be receiving some cards soon!

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We had a great time making these snowman ornaments with our buddies!  We hope you like them!  We had fun making them!

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They all have such personality!

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We have also been having fun learning about the special ways we celebrate Christmas.  Over the next few weeks, the children will be taking turns bringing home our Christmas homework!  We have four Christmas bags containing some “homework” for you to do about how your family celebrates the holidays.  One part of the homework is sharing something special you do at your house to celebrate Christmas.

To start the bags off I had the first share!  As my parents were Dutch, we celebrated Sinterclass.  I brought my wooden shoes to school and shared how Sinterclass filled my shoes when I was a little girl.  We learned some phrases in Dutch and I taught the children how to count to 10 in Dutch.  We put my wooden shoes out the door and Sinterclass came!

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We really enjoyed the first four Christmas bag shares!  The children really enjoy trying to guess what is in the bag!

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Can’t wait to see the next group!

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Christmas Lights!

IMG_1202We had a great time in December!  The children really enjoyed making the Christmas Houses!  I wish you could have heard the oohs and aahh when the glitter falls of the houses and sticks to the “glue” lights!  Lots of fun!

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We will be using these houses as covers for our Christmas Senses booklets.  I think they will make a great keepsake!  We have been recording how Christmas affects our senses.  Lots of great language and images!

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We also had a great time on our Polar Express Day! We read the book by Chris Van Alsburg and watched the movie while we completed some related work!  We had hot chocolate with lots of marshmallows, cookies, and oranges.  Yummy!  We got to wear our pajamas too.  The weather was just like at the North Pole too!   Do you see the silver bell?

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The last day before Christmas we made a Gingerbread man and put him in the oven with a lot of little gingerbread men.  He led us on a merry chase around the school! He left a clue to his route in each classroom that we visited!  We eventually caught up with him and ate him up!  We will be working on other gingerbread stories after the break!  We made a story map of the one we read!  Check it out!

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Here’s a closer view!  Love all that detail!

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Notice the name of the school!  We thought it should be Mountain View!  Hope you had a wonderful Christmas!

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Busy, Busy Christmas Time!

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The weeks have been flying by!  Why does December go so fast when you are an adult and so slow when you are a kid?

The elf and Gus have been surprising us each day in a different spot!  Here are just a few of their antics!  They have been leaving us books to read and puzzles to do!

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We have been working on the iPads and we have used them quite a bit for silent reading time.  By adding the headphones to the iPads the children can listen to the stories without distraction.    I bought a neat accessory that lets me have several children at a time listen to one iPad using their headphones!

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We have been doing lots of things with the iPads and with Christmas.   We have been drawing gingerbread men and making patterns.  We hope to incorporate these into a little book!

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We made Christmas poems using Doodle Buddy.  The children had to create text boxes and add them to the screen and then add the pictures.  Doesn’t sound like much but when you are six it is a big deal!

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They also had to change colors and use different sizes of stamps.  Lots of fun!

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Really looking forward to all the neat things we can try!

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Filed under Christmas, Doodle Buddy, Elf on the Shelf, Halloween

Elf Antics!

 

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The Elf and Gus have been having a good time in our classroom.  They decorated a little tree and decided to read Christmas stories on Wednesday night.  They left some Christmas confetti to play with too.  We are trying to record what they are up to each day in our little booklets about their adventures.

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On Thursday night they went for a ride on Mr. Mugs!

We had a great time making gingerbread houses with our Big Buddies on Friday!  We hope to blog about it in our student blogs this week!  We have downloaded Kid Blog onto the iPads and are learning how to use it.  It is a free app!

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Filed under Blogging, Buddies, Christmas, Elf on the Shelf, Student Blogs