Tag Archives: Christmas Card Project

January 16, 2015 · 7:51 pm

We’ve Got Mail Fun

We have had a great time taking part in the Holiday Card Exchange this year! I signed our class up to take part in a Global Christmas Card exchange this year! This card exchange is coordinated by Jennifer Wagner. Over 1000 teachers worldwide took part this year! We were responsible for sending out 32 cards to different schools in the world. Each of the schools in our group was responsible for sending us a card back! The theme for the cards this year was Lights. We sent off our cards in the early part of December and started receiving cards during the last week of school before the holiday break. We received the rest of the cards after Christmas.

We sent cards to faraway places like New Zealand, Japan, and Kenya! We sent cards to other parts of Canada such as Newfoundland and Ontario. We sent many cards to schools all over the United States. And we got some wonderful cards back. Some of the cards had pictures of the classes, or letters from the student who made the card.

I bought a map of the world and we displayed our mail and where it came from! You can see our mail on the display board outside of the gym. We also used Google Maps on our Promethean Board to figure out where each of our cards came from and how far away the school was from us! Using the Promethean board was awesome because I could zero in on a location of a swipe of my fingers. Very cool.

As part of the project we had to include an information page about our school. We had to include what the average temperature would be in December, how many boys and girls were in our classes, and what we liked about our school. We found out some very interesting things. The fact that the children were most interested in was how many boys or girls were in the classes!

This picture show some of our mail on one day! Very exciting to get mail just for us! The stamps were very pretty too!

This is a closeup of the letter from Nairobi, Kenya. We learned a lot from this letter.

We learned a lot about different schools around the world and how big the world is! We also learned how much fun it is to get mail! I think we are all a little sad that this project is done. We liked getting Christmas cards!

We hope they liked our cards too!

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Filed under Christmas Card Project, Promethean Board

December 7, 2014 · 10:22 pm

Christmas Fun!

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!

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.

She has been leaving treats for the children each day!

Sinterclaas paid a visit too!

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!

More AR Fun! Twitter Too!

I couldn’t resist passing out the new CoLAR augmented reality coloring pages!

I know this is a Christmas tree but isn’t it awesome!

This is the one for Happy New Year! I wish you could see and hear the children’s responses when we hold the iPads over their coloring pages!

You can see the coloring page in the back of this picture. When you open the CoLAR app and hold it over the picture the rockets and numerals pop out at you! It is magic! Entirely too much fun!

This is our hallway “twitter board”. Each week we will be posting our classroom news!

We also have a real Twitter account that I created last year. All the blog posts are tweeted out on this page and we have started to tweet about events in our class! You can follow us on Twitter but as it is a protected account you need to put in a request to follow us.

Too much fun!

We got mail! This is just some of it!

I had forgotten how much fun it is to get mail! The old-fashioned kind! This is some of the mail we got from our Christmas card project! The children loved hearing about all the different schools and classrooms! I am trying to figure out a way to show you our mail and show where it all came from!

Lots to learn!

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Filed under Augmented Reality, Twitter

Tagged as Augmented Reality, Christmas Card Project, CoLAR, twitter

December 8, 2013 · 9:13 pm

Christmas Card Fun!

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.

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.

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

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

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

They all have such personality!

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!