From Christmas Comes Winter-Manipulatives That Is!

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday.  Mine is soon to be over...we go back to school on Wednesday, but...good news!  I was so excited to get a message that I have my first follower!  Thank you! I hope you are the first of many to come! 

After creating my lesson plans this week I started to plan for my centers.  I have to admit I think my brain is still on vacation, because I couldn't think of one thing that I thought my kids would just be over the moon about, so what did I do?  I went shopping!  That's right! I loaded the whole family up and went to Wal-Mart...nothing like a little grocery shopping to stimulate the creative juices!  As soon as we entered the building, the boys (husband included) ran to the toy section to check out the newest Legos that Santa hadn't been able to fit in his sack.  I however went to see what was left of the clearance holiday stuff.  Boy did I hit the jackpot!  Most of their holiday items were 50% off.  I found some snowmen ornaments that I will use in my Working With Words center after adding letters to their bellies.  I think I will do a Words in Words pocket chart activity using the words New Year...maybe I'll add Happy, if there's not enough letters to make at least 10 words.

This inspired me to make a new version of our BAM! game.  I'm going to call it "Oh Snow!".  I have painted craft sticks white and put a sight word on each one.  I wrote "Oh, Snow!" on just a few.  For the activity, students can pull a stick out of the container and try to read the word.  If they read the word correctly, they get to keep it.  If they pull out the "Oh, Snow!" stick they have to put all their sticks back.

I made thegame storage out of an empty sugar free drink mix container.  I peeled off the shrink-wrap ad used a permanent marker to draw in the face.  I took an old snowman sock and pushed the toe up inside of itself and glued it to the edge of the lid.  I made it into a hat by tying a piece of yarn around the open end of the sock to make the bobble at the top.  I used left over pieces of foam stickers from the kits below to decorate the container.

Another great find were foam ornament sets that I will save for my class to make next year.  They didn't have a price on them, so I went to scan them and whoa baby...they were 75% off!  Can we say awesome!  I soon found out that all their Christmas craft kits were 75% off. 

I found these packages of 36 snowflakes for $1.24 per package. 

I am going to put a piece of packing tape in the middle of each so I can make a re-usable word sort using our Treasures spelling rule each week in January.

Why packing tape?  You can write on it with a permanent marker, then when you want to erase it, just use a white board marker to scribble over it, then wipe off!

I also found these foam stickers for the same price...$1.24.  I bought some Christmas and some winter.  The winter ones came with mini-snowmen that I will use with these big snowman ornament crafts for matching activities...again, using packing tape to make them changeable each week to match our focus each week.  They came with little hats too.  I haven't figured out what to use them for yet, but I'm sure I'll find a way.

This week we will be matching nouns written on the small snowmen to the big snowmen labeled person, place, thing, plural, and singular.  Next week we will be matching verbs to their tense-        present, past or future.

Last but not least, I found a super-awesome new crown to wear during small groups.  During the beginning of the year I wear a crown and talk about letter land and queen I who always gets her way...so when I wear my crown I can't be interrupted.  Great visual for the kids during small group time.  I know I look a little crazy, but my son was taking the picture while laughing which of course made me laugh...and then I couldn't stop.  Anywho!  Have a great week back!