Wednesday's Weekly Wisdom: How to Survive the last week before Christmas!

We are almost there...1 1/2 days left.  And boy, what a week this has been!  After facing the thoughts that run through your mind after the Sandy Hook tragedy, we have had our own scares and threats to deal with.  Thankfully, the week is almost over now and we can have time to regroup before January.

We have had some fun the past couple of weeks preparing for Christmas at our school.  Our school has grades 3-5 with 10 teachers in each grade.  Our principal was generous enough to purchase 6 live trees  for the kids to decorate with natural or recycled materials.  Of course, this may or may not have generated some competition from the teachers on who could get the most "pinteresting" ornaments!  We think our hub graciously gave in to others definitely won!  Here are our creations:

Other creations for our tree included reindeer, mini Christmas trees, Lady Gaga, and other creatures made from pinecones.  Another genius teacher painted pine cones to look like old-timey Christmas lights, then strung them for our garland.  Again...this is a non-biased opinion!

We did manage to squeeze in a few educational things:  

Math: We have solved Christmas word problems, solved shopping problems and worried about running out of money, and made graphs from Cap'n Crunch Christmas cereal.  

Here are the links to 2 of these items...(don't you just LOVE TPT?!?!?!)

Christmas Crunch 

Christmas Word Problems 

In Language Arts, We have been reviewing parts of speech by doing Mad Libs.  If you do a google search for free mad lib worksheets, tons will come up.

We also finished up our adjectives lesson with "Grinch" adjectives.  We cut out a green and a red grinch using a free template.  On the green Grinch, we wrote adjectives to describe his evilness (using a thesaurus to help those who struggle), and on the red Grinch, we wrote adjectives to help warm the Grinch's (everyone's ;) ) heart.  The kids really thought of some good characteristics....which can be used to our advantage muahaahahah.

These activities have really gotten us in the Christmas mood and have entertained the kids...at least a little!  What have you done to survive your last week before break?

Wednesday's Weekly Wisdom: Christmas/Holiday Gifts

Today's post is two-fold...we are letting you know our idea for Christmas gifts, but then we really need want some better ideas that we can steal.

Last year, we were on top of things.  We ordered cute ornaments in October.  Then we used the Cricut to cut out vinyl initials to personalize them.  We made a little bundle with a pencil and candy cane with the ornament.  We got the ooh's and aah's from parents and kids at the party and it was a happy world!

Now this year is another story!  We had great ideas and plans basically procrastinated too long.  Now we are down to 8 school days with no gifts!!!  Whitney is not much help because her brain is not functioning right...not that there is any stress or anything associated with our job!

This class loves junk!  By that I mean, little stuff...rings, erasers, party favors, etc.  Should we go the easy way and go to the dollar store and make "goodie bags"? 

Post your thoughts or ideas!  We need major help!  We are about Pinterested out with the holiday thing!

By the way....it can't be too Christmasy since we have a few students that do not celebrate the holiday (but are ok with "Winter" items).