Good Morning Friends,
How are you all feeling on this fine Saturday? It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas and I looooove it! I spent last night with my bestie/sister Leslie from First Grade Frenzy. We (I) decorated her Christmas tree! It's a long standing tradition that all began because I'm OCD, and well, that makes for a pretty darn good Christmas Tree Decorator. HeHe!
I'm here to tell you all about my Friday! I must say, the best teaching moments are the unexpected ones. The opportunities that arise that you just grab and run with. As mentioned above, and in practically every post on this blog, I'm slightly OCD. With that being said, I'm pretty much planned a good month ahead of time. This week, of course, I had planned to use my Santa on Vacation Craftivity for writer's workshop. I love this one. It's so much fun.
Check out this Craftivity HERE!
Please disregard the poor quality of the photos. Apparently, I had no idea what I was doing a couple years back! Not to say that I'm a professional photographer now, but I've sure improved upon my skills!
So, here I was reading Santa Retires (a pretty cute book in my opinion) and the kiddies were eating it all up.
We had a blast reading about St Nick's vacation to Mistletoe Island. Then when it cam time to write our class story about Santa's Vacation, we somehow got derailed and started talking about how to actually GET to the North Pole.
The kiddies had all kinds of different theories and they were realllllllllyyyyyy into it so I scrapped my initial plans and went with it! We wrote a series of steps that would help us get to Santa's Workshop. All I'll disclose is that we began our class text with DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME and it may have involved stealing a jet and pretending to be Rudolph. It was a riot.
I whipped up a quick little sheet for them during lunch (cause, I mean, what teacher actually takes a lunch) and then they wrote their own. It was so much fun and got some of my reluctant writer's really inspired.
All this to say, let the kiddies guide your teaching and grab every teachable moment.
You can grab a free copy of our Steps to the North Pole HERE!
While you're in blog reading mode, hop on over to Primary Powers to read my post about how we are going to celebrate Hanukah with the kiddies! And, hey, while you're there, grab yourself a little Latke Person Craftivity FREEBIE! You have visit Primary Powers to get the link!
Until next time...
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