Adorable Keepsake Parent Christmas Gift! {With a Freebie}

Are you needing an easy, quick, inexpensive parent gift?  This could be the thing for you, then!  This is a version of one of my gifts from my son when he was in preschool.  20 years later I still unpack it with my Christmas decorations.  It still melts my heart! 💝

I helped my students paint their hand green and press it on white construction paper in the shape of a wreath.  {Tip, I use sponge paint brushes to help control the amount of paint to dry faster}.  After the hands are dry, my little ones dipped their finger in red paint to make berries.

Next, I glued the wreath print on larger black construction paper, taped the corners with Washi tape {I found mine at Michael's}, and last added the hand signed tag at the bottom.

Voilá!  Easy, adorable, and very meaningful!

For the FREE tags, click here!

Merry Christmas!

Using Your Elf in Engaging. Learning. Fun. {ELF! Activities}

Do you have an Elf in your classroom?  Our classroom elf made his appearance this week.  My sweet ones are super excited and I wanted to capitalize on their excitement with some engaging learning activities with an Elf theme.  

To incorporate writing activities, each little learner has an Elf Journal to record where our Elf appears each morning.

I have seen a huge amount of success with illustrations this year since talking about what shapes are needed to draw certain pictures.  I am nothing less than amazed with my sweet babies illustrations.  In these drawings, our elf was hiding in the mouth of our old lady puppet, as you can clearly see!

This is the first page of our journal.  I love seeing the different stages of writing each little learner is in.  There is everything from scribble writing to random strings of letters, to actual words.  Each stage is exciting to watch as it develops into the next level.

Ordinal numbers are a part of our early learning standards, but it is a very difficult concept for most.  We used a real shelf and different stuffed animals to work on first, second, third, fourth, and fifth.  This is a concept that seems super easy at first, but let me tell you, it is very difficult!  We practiced a lot with objects and even ourselves lining up.  This is something we will definitely revisit again.

Positional words can also be tricky for the early learner.  Here I used a shelf and an actual elf to help my learners with some hands on activities to reinforce this concept.

Then, we practiced again in this take home reader.

Using present tree ornaments (available at most craft stores), we counted for some one to one correspondence practice. 

After that, we tried to figure out the missing number in a sequence.

What's an Elf Theme without an adorable craftivity?  This project had a lot of difficult cutting, but my pre-k students rocked their scissor skills!  Didn't they turn out super cute?

You can find these activities and MUCH more in my Elf Pack.

Our Gingerbread Week!

 1. 

We read so many different versions of gingerbread books this week and then made our own!

2.

Some of my learners have mastered letter recognition and are ready for letter sounds, so they matched cookies to plates by abc's/alphabet sounds.

 For extra alphabet practice, this little learner is finding letters of the alphabet on the gingerbread house gumdrop roof.

3.

 To work on math concepts, we used these gingerbread ten frame counting sheets with dice and gumdrops.  They are loving all these hands on activities!

4.

 Of course, no gingerbread unit is complete without making your own gingerbread cookies!

 And, gingerbread play dough is the BEST!

That was a peek at our Gingerbread Week!  :

5.

 I just completed my Gingerbread Pack: Math and Literacy activities.  Here's a peek at what's included:

Some of the literacy activities are a positional word interactive emergent reader.

 A "Man on the Pan" rhyming activity, along with a student sheet to check understanding.

Upper and lowercase recognition activities, using gumdrops or other markers

Along with a black and white student page to use with a bingo dot marker or crayon/marker.

Matching letter sounds to letters of the alphabet.  Also matching upper and lower case letters.

A gingerbread man class book template with different cover options

and clues for your own gingerbread hunt throughout the school! 

So. Much. Fun!

Some math activities include: non-standard measuring.

Numbers concepts, such as ten frames, tally marks, one to one correspondence, number, and number word recognition.

One to one correspondence counting activities with gumdrops/candies or counters.

Ten frame counting with gumdrops/candies or counters.

Color matching and color word recognition

Student recording sheets

 Cookie shape matching and shape sight word activities

and student recording sheets

These are just some of the activities.

Be sure to check out all the Giant Gingerbread Fun!

Be sure to check out Doodle Bugs Teachings Five for Friday post to see what everyone else has been up to this week!