Gingerbread Buddies Update Plus More!

Woooot! I remembered my camera! Wooot Wooot! My husband passed his promotion board! Can the day get any better? Oh wait! It can! Pizza is on the way! I know, what a way to celebrate, right? But I am bone tired and had to stay after school for Family Night and the book fair and meet with a rep for a PTA fundraiser, and my poor husband has been up since 4am to get ready for a big reenlistment ceremony he was in charge of, so neither one of us is up to actually doing anything. Maybe this weekend since I am heading down to Wichita Falls (closest Petco) to pick up my Pets in the Classroom grant purchases! This year I asked for an aquarium with fishies and I cannot wait to go get it and get it set up! So we will celebrate down in Texas this weekend - in between my stops at Petco and Target of course!

Today was long, but good. Here are some picture highlights:

 

We finished up our Spring Apple trees, using tissue paper squares. This was a great fine motor activity and it was fun to see how intense the kids got as they twisted the tissue paper onto their pencils and dipped it into the glue. I think they all did a fabulous job - as you can see from the picture some of us were more successful than others, but all of them put a lot of effort into their trees! Since most of us had never seen a apple tree in blossom before I just googled a painting of one and put it on our Smartboard. We played some Mozart in the background and had a great time!

I also have to share what we did the other day too - we finished up our  Alphabet Exchange letters! If you're in Group 1 our letters should be winging their way to your school soon! Here's our hallway display:

 Do you see the glaring error? Well, it was glaring for one of my first graders - I didn't catch it and neither did my own 4 kiddos. Granted, I hung the letter after work the other day and everyone just wanted to get the picture taken and get out the door, but apparently the whole family needs a refresher course on alphabetical order!

 

 I love it because we have to pass by it several times a day, as do the other K-2 classes. Everyone always looks at our new letters and tries to find them on our map!

Here's how we made our letters:

 We tried two different techniques - dry brushing and marble painting. They both turned out beautiful, but I have to say the marble painting was more fun!

 Talk about a fine motor work out - twisitng the chenille stems together and wrapping them around a pencil was hard for some of us!

But, our finished products were adorable:

 
I will be back tomorrow night with some work station photos! In the meantime, here's the details on my Gingerbread Buddies Exchange! First, no blog necessary! As long as you are willing to create some sort of Gingerbread craft with your students and include a gingerbread decoration (under $10), you can participate! To give you a couple of ideas, click here for my new Gingerbread Pinterest board. You could also make a class book retelling the story instead - be as creative or as crafty as you are comfortable with! I just think it will be fun to get some gingerbread friends in the mail :)