Calendar Exchange & Performance

It's a Galatas Kindergarten tradition to exchange calendars as Christmas gifts. As teachers, we think it's important for kids to begin using a personal calendar at an early age and starting those organizational habits early! The exchange is always fun - I read 'Twas The Night Before Christmas and the children pass the calendars each time the word and is read. They did a great job!

When the story was over, it was time to OPEN!

We got some fun calendars! The kids were delighted with their new presents!

What adorable kids!

We performed two songs for our parents before the Christmas party - Jingle Bells and Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer.

Rudolphs' nose "glowing"...

Merry Christmas from K5!

Ho, Ho, Ho!

We made homemade Santa hats for our Christmas party. The kids are SO into making "costumes" for every occasion. Since the Pilgrim and Native American constumes for the Thanksgiving feast, they are chomping at the bit to create wearable art!

Each child made his or her own hat by cutting a freeform triangle, then a white circle for the "puff" at the top of Santa's hat. They unraveled cotton balls to make the fluffy trim and then glued the hat to a sentence strip.
I was in charge of "alterations", making sure each hat fit properly and didn't squish any ears. : )

Before too long, we had a room full of jolly Santas!

Christmas in our Classroom!

A peek at our holiday decorations...

I love these rectangle trees with hole-punched "snow"!

Aren't these star Santas just the cutest?

A whole door full are even cuter!

This Advent Calendar is one of our favorite classroom traditions. Each morning when we work with our calendar, we add a cotton ball to Santa's beard as we count down the days left until he visits our chimneys!

During this season, the children love to write about everything related to Christmas. Our special thematic word wall is filled with word cards that help children spell everything from angel to wreath. Children are able to take a card out of the pocket chart and use it to spell a word in their writing. This word wall changes seasonally and will be filled with winter words when we return from our holiday.

Olive The Other Reindeer

After reading the story, Olive The Other Reindeer, we decided to create reindeer of our own. The kids traced their feet to create the reindeer face from construction paper. Tracing your own foot is harder than it looks!

The next step was to make a reindeer nose. My smarties figured out they could trace a gluestick cap to make a perfect circle!

Glue everything down and attach the poem...

Now the fun part - paint!! This little guy said, "I don't know about this... it seems messy!" (I think he should be the teacher! He has a good inner voice of reason!)

Paint both hands to make the antlers...

Make sure to squish it down!

I bet you can't wait to see the finished product! They'll be coming home this week! : )