Snow, Elf on a Shelf, & The Grinch

Our theme was Snow and winter.  

We read The Elf on the Shelf and introduced Herbie to the class on Monday.  Students were told they could write a letter to Herbie while he was watching and it would get to Santa.  I saw more students writing than I had ever seen before! They were trying to sound out words, write letters they had never written before and more!  It was amazing to see!

In our small group we worked on patterning with snowflakes.  We started with an AB pattern and if students were able to complete that we moved onto an AAB or an ABB pattern.  Students are doing very well with patterning. This product was not mine, but can be found at the following link: Click here for source of snowflake patterning.

Tuesday we read The Gingerbread Man.  We began practicing the role playing of the skit and showing how a story can be made into parts.  Students were very enthusiastic about it!  On Wednesday we assigned parts and began practicing.  Students are very excited.  We are doing this in a reader's theater style, I read the stories and the students in those parts reenact it as I am reading.  

We read The Grinch that Stole Christmas on Wednesday focusing on the first two pages; The Grinch hated Christmas because his heart was 3 sizes to small.  He needed to learn about love before it could grow.  We then made a large Grinch for our classroom and are going to write the kind things we see our friends doing that made our heart grow and showed us love.  So far it is off to a slow start, but as we talk about it I feel they will get the hang of it.  I will encourage this to be a writing activity as well, brining in letter sounds and seeing if they can help with any of the letters while writing it out.  We also watched the cartoon movie of The Grinch that Stole Christmas.  Children enjoyed the change of pace.  

They also began a measuring unit with snowflakes. We measured how many "big snowflakes" tall we were, and measured how many small snowflakes a variety of objects were in our room. We then wrote these numbers on our data sheets.

Freebie available on TPT

Through out the week, students come into the room looking for the trouble Herbie got into during the week.  He was hiding in our drop bucket (where we put a drop in when we made good choices) on Tuesday.  He must be looking how many great choices we had made thus far to tell Santa all about them!  On Wednesday, I caugt him coming into the classroom when I turned on the lights and he had to hang from a rope on or window all day until we went home.  Thursday, he must have gotten hungry, he was sitting in a bowl full of home living food!