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?