Who's on break!! I am!!!

Can I say Christmas break? Whoooo!! These past 2 weeks have been totally crazy! No, crazy may not be a good vocabulary word. bedlam. Bat-poop crazy. I am so tired, I want to retire hectic!! Take me away, Calgon!! hectic and crazy!! Who's with me? Plus, it was a full moon! WTHeck???

Yes, friends. It was that kind of week and then some! We are not even going to go there! But I will go and show you some things we worked on. A bit late, but better late than never, right?

We worked on gingerbread men and had an amazing time at our gingerbread decorating event! The kids had a blast and we did a cross text compare and contrast on some favourite gingerbread stories! 

It was just too fun for words! I think their favourite was "Gingerbread Cowboy!" 

"Giddyup, Giddyup as fast as you can! You can't catch me, I'm the Gingerbread Man!' we'd read and pretend to ride a horse!! That might have something to do with that being their favourite story! *Maybe*! LOL!

Then we did the cutest writing activity from my Gingerbread Adventures pack:

Gingerbread similes! They came out absolutely ADORBS!!

They had so much fun making and writing about them! Even the boys were excited about making them! We also worked on a few other centers:

Compound Cookies

 Gingerbread Digraphs

I wish I had taken pictures of the other centers but we were... BUSY!! I was busy getting ready for our gingerbread party! Check out the pics! 

After they made their houses, I had a BINGO game and a holiday photo booth! 

If you'd like to plan a gingerbread decorating party for next year, head over to the Primary Chalkboard where I posted some free downloads of the forms I used! 

Then if we weren't busy with that, we made these adorable crafts for the parents!

I do not know who the original creator of this craft is but if you know, please let me know so I can give you proper credit!! But these are ones that I love to make every year! This year, I filled them with fake snow! uhhh... not fun! I basically had to jam them in with a pencil!

I also loved how I packaged them! Again, sorry for being late but an idea for you all next year! I used Solo cups and some of that paper filler from the Dollar Tree, some ribbon, a homemade tag, and there you have a thing of beauty and love!!

A great, inexpensive yet heartwarming gift for the parents from the kids! 

And to end my week.. I had a workshop today! How nice... I had grades due, set up my classroom, clean up from the bedlam that was the week of Christmas break, and they tell me I have a workshop?? Well, it was actually a great workshop!! I loved it and learned some great tools to use to go along with Common Core Math and they will not cost me a billion dollars to incorporate into my classroom. the good news is, I already incorporate a lot of it anyway! 

Here's one that I will be using with and making with my kids in the new year! Bean sticks! Have you heard of them??

Photo courtesy of Catherine Kuhns

Me either! Again, if you are the creator or this, please let me know so I can give you credit for this! When speaking of number sense and base ten, the presenter Catherine Kuhns (click on the pic above to visit her site and see her awesome resources!) suggests having students use these instead of ten sticks! Genius!! I agree! She showed some pictures of students using these when showing 6 tens = 60 and then 6 tens and 1 ten = 7 tens or 70. It was amazing! Then there were slides of moving on to add ones! Just loved this idea because the kids could actually SEE the ten on the bean stick versus the lines on the tens rod! So, I think this will be a new project!

Catherine also showed us a great resource for those who use rekenreks:

It's called Number Rack and it's a FREE app! I downloaded it on my iphone and its pretty cool. There are some paid versions from different software companies. Just check them out. I know The Math Coaches Corner also has some great resources, too!

Anyhow, that's what we've been up to!! Hope you all have a great weekend and I'll be back soon with some treats for you!