Happy Holidays!!!

Well if you're like me, today is your last teaching day of 2012.

I thought I'd post up some art from the hallways of my school.

I found these amazing, patterned Santas in front of the Grade 6 classroom, and knew I needed to share them.  Enjoy!

 

 

Quick and easy wreath

 

 

Here's a super easy and really effective Christmas wreath.

You will need green construction paper in a variety of green colours.

You can die cut them in leaf shapes like I did, but if you don't have access to a die cutter, you can use leaf tracers, or punches, whatever you have around.

Sometimes I get the children to cut holly shaped leaves out of strips of green cardstock.

 

The you can cut a donut shape out of green cardstock.  I used a dinner plate for the outside ring and a smaller ring on the inside.  I also sometimes use a paper plate and cut out the inside.  It doesn't have to be a perfect circle, the whole thing will be covered up with leaves. 

slowly cover the ring with leaves.  Make sure the children layer them and cover up the green 'donut' shape.  Some of my students decided to pattern the leaves as in the ring below.

Add a bow of red ribbon and some Chrismtas foam shapes and voila!

Here are a few of my favourites.

 

Post Card from Santa Freebie

 I'm super excited to share this new creation of mine with you.  After having so much success with my Falling Leaves little books, I have decided to start a new series called SUCCESS AT THEIR OWN LEVEL.  It's my approach to differentiated learning. 

 

This is a letter to Santa activity which is good for children of many levels of development from K to 2.  I've broken it up into 3 levels.  The beginning level is good for Kindergarten, Level 2 for grade one, and level 3 for grade 2.  But of course we always have those struggling readers who need a bit of extra support and those more advanced readers who could use an extra challenge. This program would allow a primary class to all write a post card to Santa at their own ability level. 

 

If you'd like your own copy, hop on over to my Teachers Pay Teachers store, or click on the link below to get your own copy.  Remember that I love feedback and would love to hear from you.

 

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD

 

 

 

 

And after all of that, I have finally found the time to link up with Farley's Currently over at Oh Boy 4th grade.  Click here to check out the other links.  Don't get me started on how C-R-A-Z-Y this week will be for me.  I'll fill you all in later. 

 

Thanks for stopping by.

Christmas Angels

 

Well December is almost here.  It's time to start the Christmas Art.

I don't ususally teach anything religious for Christmas, but these angels are really easy and effective.

 

Where I work, there are a number of christians, but there are also a lot of children whose families practice other religions.  I feel, that we are not supposed to teach religious doctrine in public schools, there's no harm in introducing the kids to the story of Christmas and where all the vocabulary comes from.

 

 

The kids will see nativity scenes and angels in the mall, and on people's lawn's, so I feel, as an educator, I need to teach the children all the vocabulary associated with Christmas.  I also teach Santa, Rudolph, Frosty the Snowman etc.

 

Anyway, I had all these styrofoam balls, so we painted them with peach coloured paint.  Then the kids cut out half circles of scrapbook paper to make the skirt.

 

 

The arms were strips of other scrapbook paper with a pipe cleaner for sturdiness.   I cut up some older music, and folded it to make a choir book.

 

The hair and halo's were in my stash, and I attached them with a glue gun.

And the wings were made from cupcake papers from the big box stores.