Keeping the classroom "merry and bright" and SANE! during the last 2 weeks before Christmas

WOW! Is it December already!? Where does the time go!! 

I hope everyone has been enjoying prepping for the holidays. We have been trying to mix a little holiday fun in at school to go along with all our hard third grade work. 

At Thanksgiving we made these cute acorn turkeys...credit to Mrs. Kreider for the wonderful idea. She did these last year with her Kindergartners and they turned out so cute, we just had to do them too!

Our second MP writing theme involves us learning the formatting for a friendly letter. I thought we would incorporate this and write 2 letters: One to "Tom the Turkey" apologizing for eating him for Thanksgiving dinner and another to Santa in December. We are hard at work on our Santa stories, but here are a few samples of our Tom letters that turned out wonderfully!

We also have some fun Christmas activities going on it our classroom to keep our last few weeks. We have a classroom elf, Eddie, that hides in a different location every morning. The kids love trying to find him when they come in. We also made "elf applications" and wrote a persuasive paragraph to Santa telling him why we should be his new hires! Each kid also got a picture in an elf hat that will go on the bulletin board next to their application.  Lastly, we are counting down the days till Christmas on our whiteboard using Santa's beard. For some added fun, Santa's bearded cotton balls are rainbow colored. Psychedelic Santa!

 Eddie the Elf

 Elf Applications

  HAHA!! This was one of my favorites :)

Although the holidays are wonderful to fit in, we have been focusing really hard on the start of our multiplication unit. Below is a short video clip of our "2's trot" a CD of skip counting songs we listen to each day to help us with memorization of our times tables. 

Click on the link below to see a video of our 2's trot!

https://picasaweb.google.com/113748562495422619148/December82013?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCNKr3Zidw6Ot6AE&feat=directlink

We are also studying pronouns. We did a fun "Pronoun Pairs" activity where we had to highlight the noun in a sentence and then find its matching card and highlight the coordinating pronoun that matches! 

Time to get my Sunday morning coffee! I'll be sure to post a few more holiday/winter goodies on here very soon!

Have a wonderful December!