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!
Here are a few of the treats left for us each day!
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!
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!
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!
We also filled out applications to become elves. I sent them home for Christmas. Hope you enjoyed them!
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!
There were a few elves in his sack that tried to get out but he managed to keep them hidden!
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!
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!
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!
Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas! Have a Happy New Year!
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!
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!
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!
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!
They also had to change colors and use different sizes of stamps. Lots of fun!
Really looking forward to all the neat things we can try!
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.
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!
Mrs. Anton's Class! 