Happy Holidays!!!

Holiday Stations!

Here are a few pictures from our awesome Holiday Stations that our room moms organized!  They were so much fun!  Thank you to everyone who volunteered and/or sent in items!  We appreciate it so much!  Happy Holidays!  

Gingerbread Fun!

Our Gingerbread Man unit is my absolute favorite one that we do all year!  We start out by reading "The Gingerbread Man".  Throughout the week we read different versions of the story.  "The Gingerbread Girl", "The Gingerbread Boy", "The Gingerbread Cowboy", etc.  We keep track of each version's story elements on a chart.  We compare titles, setting, characters, refrains, and endings.  It was so neat to see all the connections the kids came up with!  We had so much fun reading them.  One morning we caught our elf, Buddy, reading one of our Gingerbread books!  

Later that afternoon Buddy had a surprise for us along with a letter from Santa!  It was everything we needed to make our very own gingerbread men!  We read instructions and followed the recipe.  We each got a ball of dough and we flattened it out and used cookie cutters to cut out our gingerbread man.  

We put our cookies on the cookie sheet and sent them off to the cafeteria to be baked.  We asked the cafeteria cook to wait and cook them the next morning so that they would be ready for us to eat after lunch.  

Well you would not believe what happened the next day when we went to go get our freshly baked cookies!  They were gone!  All that was left was a few crumbs!  We thought that either someone ate them (a lot of the kids believed Coach was the culprit) or they ran off on their own.  We decided we should make some wanted posters to hang up around the school.  Take a look at our posters below!  

After we finished our posters, we walked around the school and hung them up.  We put one in the office, the cafeteria, near the library, art room, music room, and bathrooms.  When we got back into our classroom, Buddy had another surprise for us!  He had found our cookies!  

We were so excited that our gingerbread men had been found!  We couldn't wait to gobble them up!  But first we had a few things we had to do.  We graphed what part we ate first- the head, arm, leg, or tummy.  

We also did some gingerbread science.  Our essential question was why didn't the gingerbread man just swim across the river instead of getting on the fox's back.  We came up with our hypothesis and then tested it.  We put a gingerbread man in a cup of water and observed what happened.  We found out that when they cookie was in the water, it soaked it up and began to crumble.  

We had so much fun with our Gingerbread Man unit!