Whew! What a week. Plus a freebie!
This week, was hectic, to say the least. What with working with our little buddies, wrapping up instructional units, the faculty luncheon, the reindeer revue (a holiday concert in which the superintendent sings Christmas songs with professional musicians and encourages the kids to form conga lines. Seriously; I’m not making that part up.), the class holiday party, book exchanges, and all the other hullaballoo and hoohah that goes along with the last days of school in December, I was more than a little nutty.
In order to maintain a reasonable amount of nervous excitement in my classroom and keep the minions under wraps, I devised a sneaky system of keeping track of class-wide behavior and making them ‘earn’ their holiday party. For whole-class good behavior, they earned an “Oh Yeah!” which is a smiley face on a chart. For poor behavior, they earned an “Oh, No!” or a smiley face on a chart.
They had to earn ten more smileys than frowns, (reinforce math skills – oh, yeah!) in order to earn their holiday party. It just so happened to work out at the last minute (almost like someone planned it that way! hmmm…..) that they earned one final smiley to complete their 10 smiley difference. We had earned our holiday party, minutes before it was scheduled to begin. Whew!
In other news, we wrapped up 2011 with a few fun activities. The first one was our digraph trees:
I made each kid four little trees and wrote our spelling words (words with different digraphs in them). The kids colored, cut them out, and sorted them. It was a fun idea.
Eventually, though, the incessant cutting got a little old for one of the kids. “This started out fun. But now…it’s kind of horrible.” Haha! Oh well, kid, that’s what Christmas is all about!
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This is the front. Notice the adorable angry birds ornaments! |
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This is the inside: this is the sh tree. There were sh, th, and ch trees. |
Those trees are so cute. I will be putting that idea away for next year. : )
-Lauren
The Weekly Hive
BTW – How do you get your blog to have a link to it when you post comments???