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Our Week in Pictures & A Candy Cane Freebie!

What a busy weekend!  I spent most of it coaching – we had a basketball game Friday and Saturday night.  Today, I went with my husband and mother-in-law to Grove City outlets in Pennsylvania to do some mega Christmas shopping.  It was so fun!  We scored some great deals.  My sole reason for the trip was the Coach and Vera Bradley outlet.  I picked up some gifts and then kinda…sorta…might have…picked myself up a couple things.  Shhh…!  I know, Christmas is right around the corner.  Don’t worry, I feel guilty about it, but a girl has got to take advantage of a good sale, right? 😉  

As for life in first grade, we had so much fun this week!  We started by making our suitcases for our Around the World trip.  First we looked up each flag online and the kids colored the stickers to match.  This week we will travel to Brazil, South Africa, China, and Canada. We’ll end the week making applesauce/cinnamon homemade ornaments as our America/Canada souvenir. 

We also wrote daily in our Elf on a Shelf journal.  I laugh every day at the way my kids promise me they saw the elf move his head or blink his eyes.  I love watching their faces when they find him each morning.  It makes me want to be six years old all over again. 
Here are some of the things our elf did this week:
First, he borrowed my crown for the day.  I wear my crown when I’m doing guided reading groups or progress monitoring.  My kiddos know that when the crown is on my head, “The queen can’t be bothered.” 🙂 They love this!
On Wednesday, we found Christopher writing a letter to Santa.  I forgot to take a picture of the letter.  I had started the letter: “Dear Santa,  Today I am reporting who is on the naughty and nice list….”  Wow! My kids were angels on Wednesday.  Nobody wanted Christopher to give Santa a bad report.  
On Thursday, our elf was hiding in our Christmas tree.  They decided he chose to hide up there so that he could have a good view of our classroom.
Christopher wrote our trick words and added our math vocabulary to our whiteboard.  He’s a great helper!
On Friday, we had a fun “candy cane” morning.  First, we practiced double digit addition and subtraction on our whiteboards.  Then, we completed a math freebie on double digit addition/subtraction from Live and Learn on TpT.  It was so cute and appropriate for this point of time in first grade math. 
Finally, I passed out a candy cane to each child and a measuring activity.  Their candy cane mission was to go around the classroom and measure common objects (and friends!) in our room using the nonstandard measurement of a candy cane.  They had a blast and it was a great introduction to measurement!
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Have your own candy cane fun by clicking the picture below to grab a little Christmas freebie from me! I tried to make the items very general so they can fit many classrooms.  Hopefully it can work for you! 🙂  
I hope everyone has a great week! I’ll be spending it knee deep in winter DRAs! Let’s hope your week is much more exciting. 🙂
Happy Learning,

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3 Comments

  1. Just wanted to pop in and congratulate you on your tpt milestone! We started around the same time and I am no where near your earnings…LOL! I haven't given my blog my 100% 🙁

    Anyway, thanks for sharing these activities. It looks like your kids had a blast!

    We made our cinnamon ornaments today which I will be blogging about tomorrow 🙂

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