Tag: Christmas

Posted in Books, Craft Thursdays

A Fancy Christmas

Posted on by Mrs. Malo


One of the series that many little girls love is Fancy Nancy.  Last year for Christmas Kaitlyn recieved Fancy Nancy Splendiferous Christmas.

Nancy’s favourite time of year is Christmas because everything that is normally dull and boring becomes fancy.  Last summer she spent all of her birthday money to buy the most extravagant and fancy topper for the Christmas tree and finally can put it on the top of the tree.  While waiting for Grandpa to arrive she is playing with her dog and they accidently knock over the tree breaking the angel.  Nancy is devastated but then Grandpa helps her make a new special ornament that can become a family heirloom.  A cute story with familiar characters and a good message about family traiditions.

The activity for this one was very obvious.  I got a large variety of items out of our craft bins, everything from pipcleaners and pom poms, to paint, plates and every sticky, sparkling or sticker that we have.  First the girls painted their paper plates (both sides) and then I let them loose to decorate them.  The only thing they needed help with were making the holes for the pipecleaners and ribbon (which are difficult to see in the pictures. Kaitlyn’s is a star and Eileen decided her was a face.

Posted in Books, Character Ed, In the Community

Rudolph & Kaitlyn to the Rescue

Posted on by Mrs. Malo

December 13th book was Rudolph to the Rescue by Robert L. May and illustrated by Lisa Papp

I will start off my saying I am not a huge fan of this book but the girls like it, it is an identifiable character and it fit nicely with the activity I wanted to do on the 13th.  After Christmas Rudolph helps Santa go through all of his Thank you cards from the boys and girls around the world and finds a very sad letter from Sonny and Sis who Santa missed because they are part of a circus and Santa couldn’t find them.  Rudolph makes it is mission to find Sonny and Sis and make sure this doesn’t happen again.

Every year at Christmas the school we ask that instead of buying teacher’s Christmas Presents the children bring an unwrapped toy for the toy drive.  Kaitlyn hadn’t purchased hers yet so this became a good activity for one of our books.  I thought it fit nicely with Rudolph to the Rescue as there were two children in the book who didn’t get any presents for Christmas.  After skating on Monday I took the girls to Zellers to find a toy.  Kaitlyn picked out a ZuZu pet toy that was perfect for the toy drive.

Posted in Books, Kinder science

Ice Cubes & What Christmas Means to You

Posted on by Mrs. Malo

December 11th was a Sunday and our book was the veggie tale book Yuletide Ice Cub Festival.

A few years ago Kaitlyn loved Veggie Tales and we picked up this book.  It is a large board book format.  They still enjoy Veggie Tales but not as much as they use to.  This story is about the annual Ice cube fair and the famous ice block carving festival.  Participants have to make an ice sculpture on Major Bob’s theme and this years theme is “What Christmas Means to You”.  In rhyming verse all the characters create their glorious creations and it finishes by showing Junior’s tiny sculpture of a shepherd kneeling beside the stable, of course his was the winner.

I decided to do a science activity with the girls and let them explore with ice cubes.  First we tried to make our own sculpture out of ice using ice cubes and salt but that was a dismal failure.  Instead I decided to go more simple and challenge them to see who was able to melt their ice cube the fastest.

Kaitlyn instantly tried to squeeze hers and it started to melt pretty quick.  After she accidently dropped it on the floor she realized that was a good thing and it would melt faster in more pieces.  This was bit tricky for Eileen and with Daddy’s help she microwaved it for a few seconds, after that she thought is was more fun as a bath for Donald Duck.  Even with Daddy’s help Kaitlyn’s melted faster, and she was quite proud of herself!

Posted in Books, Family Adventures

Here Comes Santa Claus

Posted on by Mrs. Malo

Every year we host an All Ages Family Christmas Party.  We have been doing it since 2007 making this our 5th Annual and it has been the ‘it’ party for our kids and our friends kids.  It started out as a way for everyone to get together without having to get a babysitter and for the kids to get to see Santa in a non-threatening environment. I knew that it has become a hit when all of the older kids were plastered to the front window when I asked everyone to come up from the playroom, next year Santa is going to come to the back door – LOL!

For December 10th, the day of our party I picked the book: Here Comes Santa Claus, illustrate by Bruce Whatley.

The words to this book are the lyrics of the song, 4 verses.  The illustrations tell a story all their own and are included with a bit of their own text in terms of a letter to and from Santa.  Kaitlyn was excited to read these letters all by herself.

At the beginning and end of this book there is also the sheet music for playing the song.  It is not an easy song to play but Daddy can play the easy one hand version and we have been practicing the first verse so before Christmas I will record us all singing it and post it in a podcast.  Kaitlyn took it to her piano teacher last week and she played it with both hands for her so she could hear the full version.

 

Posted in Books, Family Adventures, Milestones

The Christmas Tree

Posted on by Mrs. Malo

One of my main themes I have been using with my Kindergarten class this month has been Christmas Trees and so I am very tired of tree books but I found a different one that was perfect  for December 9th, the day we were suppose to get our Christmas Tree.  Grandmother’s Tree by Avril Tyrrell and illustrated by Frances Tyrrell  is told through the eyes of a Christmas Elf ornament, one of the oldest ornaments on the family tree.  The ornaments are very excited as it is the time of year that they get taken out and placed on the Christmas tree.  Some of them are older and others are new but they all have a place on the Christmas tree.

This is the perfect story to read before decorating the Christmas tree.  It provides children perspective and leads to great questions while putting up their favourite ornaments.  This didn’t quite work for us as we changed when we got our tree and it was already up when I read this story.  This didn’t stop Kaitlyn – she loves pointing out all the ornaments they each got on their first Christmas.

Instead I found a simple Christmas Tree craft the girls could both easily do in our Usborne Preschool Activity book Christmas Fun. 

The very first craft in this book is Stencil Trees.  Kaitlyn and I made these a couple of years ago so I knew Eileen would be able to do it easily.  I wanted to let them make them their own way so I did not show them the pictures in the craft book.

To prepare I made the tree stencil by folding a piece of paper in half and cutting out half a tree for each of the girls.  Then I taped it to a piece of cover stock and set the girls up with green paint.  I showed them how to make fingerprints all over their trees.

This started off pretty well but then Kaitlyn decided she liked it better if she smeared all the prints together and pretty soon they had covered the entire tree.  It wasn’t what I had planned but it was what they wanted to do so it was perfect.

We let them dry overnight and the next day it was time to decorate them.  I picked up a variety of jewels and decorations up at the dollar store and they glued them on the tree.  Kaitlyn did hers independently and Eileen just needed a bit of help putting the glue where she wanted it.  I didn’t get any stars and they both asked for stars for the tops of their trees.  This is a bit ironic as our family tree has an angel at the top.  Kaitlyn put snowflakes around the top of her tree and declared it was outside.  A very easy craft to make with young children, especially those who love paint!

Posted in Books, Cooking with the Kiddies, Craft Thursdays, Family Adventures

Our Ginger Home

Posted on by Mrs. Malo

When I was shopping at the end of November I picked up Home For Christmas not realizing it is the newest book by Jan Brett.  I knew it was a Jan Brett but didn’t notice the 2011 publication date.  I hadn’t even read the book but decided it would be good for the 8th day of December when we were to decorate our Gingerbread House.

This is the tale of a young and carefree troll named Rollo who still has his tale, because trolls only loose their tail if they are kind.  Always doing whatever he wants Rollo leaves home and on his journey spends time with different animal families throughout the year.  No matter what he does he just doesn’t seem to fit in with any of the animals for very long, and ends up back at home, a changed troll, just in time for Christmas.  We read through it for simple enjoyment, and loved taking in Brett’s pictures but their are so many literacy and character connection that can be made.  As with all of Brett’s book the illustrations are perfect for helping children predict what is coming up next in the story, and inferring what the characters are feeling and thinking.

This was to be a fun activity so I didn’t want to get too serious – on to the Gingerbread house.  Now we do a Gingerbread house from scratch every year and it is a 3 day adventure.  A number of years ago I found a great site that gave a perfect outline and template for making a gingerbread house.  I printed it off and we use the same recipe every year.  The first year I made templates for the shapes and a board for the house, which are put back into one of our many Christmas boxes after the holidays to be brought out the next year.  On day 1 I bake the house and sometimes get a bit of help from the girls.  I always have lots of dough left over and make Gingerbread Men out of the leftovers.  Sometimes I make the stained glass windows using lifesavers (if I remember before baking) and this year the girls loved crushing the lifesavers.

On day 2 I assemble the house.  I use books and pop cans to help prop up the pieces.  This is an activity for after the kids have gone to bed!

Day 3, which fell on December 8th this year, is the fun day – it is decorating day.  I took Kaitlyn to the grocery store bulk section and let her pick out a variety of candies.   We we everything up on the table and decorated!

Mommy’s job is to put the icing on and the girls are responsible for decorating.  This is the first year I pretty much did none of the decorating.  Kaitlyn is very much into hearts so she put a large heart on each side of the roof.  Eileen pretty much ate more candy than she put on the house, but she made a good effort with creating a pattern with the M&Ms.  This year we pretty much had to decorate the house twice.  We did it Thursday afternoon before the daycare Christmas concert, but while I was getting Eileen dressed for the concert Michael crawled up on the table and ate off half of the candy (most of it he simply spit out).  I quickly cleaned up the mess the best I could and then when we got home from the concert we decorated it again.  Now it is kept well out of reach from Michael.  It has dried but I still don’t want to take any chances!

Posted in Books

A Barbie Christmas?

Posted on by Mrs. Malo

A couple of years ago my in-laws gave Kaitlyn the Barbie version of “A Christmas Carol” for Christmas. This was her very first introduction to Barbie and I wasn’t quite ready for it – especially when she watching the movie non stop for 3 months.  Then I quietly managed to hide it and only bring it out during the Christmas season. I never thought I would intentially bring it out for the girls but that is exactly what I did on Day 7 of our 24 books of Christmas.

I don’t remember where  it came from but the book ended up in our collection last year.  I needed an easy book and activity for Wednesday as Eileen has hockey and when we all get home we are tired and have limited time.  I read the book to the girls and then they curled up and watched the movie, I even made myself watch part of it with them.  This year we didn’t do any more than that but I can definitely see doing some text-to-text connecting with other versions of “A Christmas Carol”.  The problem right now is that many are quite scary for kids, even the Mickey Mouse version is pretty dark, but this Barbie version is not frightening for the girls.

The whole Barbie issue is an interesting issue.  This year it is very big in our house.  I can understand the issues that some people have with the body image issues that Barbie brings up, but the creative play that my girls do with their Barbies is very cool.  They are always making up new setting and scenarios for them and that is the type of creative play I love to encourage.  I would love to hear your thoughts.

Posted in Books, Literacy Tuesdays

An Acrostic Christmas

Posted on by Mrs. Malo

I am a few days behind on my blogs and much of this is because we missed our book last Tuesday (catching up from the Sunday before).  I really want to tell you about them in the order I originally planned so we just finished the book schedule for the 6th day and here it is:

I found Merry Christmas: A Victorian Verse by Mary Teichman at our local discount book store and thought it would be a great book for Literacy Tuesdays.  Originally published in 1993, it reads as if it was written 100 years ago.  This is a great book for working on literacy skills with both of my girls.  It is written using the letters in the phrase “Merry Christmas”.  Each page is a different letter: “M for the Music, merry and clear”.  For Eileen she loved reading me the letter on each page and then I would read the rest of the phrase.  After a couple of pages Kaitlyn decided it was her job to tell us the sound that the letter makes, fine with me!  They didn’t realize while we read it that there is a rhyming scheme but I could easily point it on on a re-read.

For Eileen’s activity we focused on letter recognition and made it a bit more fun by adding in our alphabet stamps.  On the back is written the complete text of the poem in the book.  I asked her to tell me the name of each letter, and then she would find the stamp and then stamp it on her paper.  It worked pretty well but a couple of times she got mixed up on where to stamp hence it is a bit difficult to make out the Merry Christmas.  I realized after that we also missed the last S.  When you remember that she is only 3 I think the exercise worked pretty well.

Kaitlyn’s activity was to write her own acrostic poem.  We have not done any poetry at home yet but she loves to write so I knew she would like this activity.  I first asked her to pick a Christmas word or phrase and she came up with ‘Santa Claus’.  I thought this was the perfect length for her and not too long.  She wrote the letters down the left hand side of her page and we decided to write ‘is for’ after each letter to make it easier for her to write and read.  She got stuck on a few letters but the only one Mommy had to give her was nativity for the letter N.  After she was done her rough copy she stamped out the word Santa Claus (it was her idea to do the colour pattern) and then neatly printed her poem. I think she did an awesome job!

Posted in Books, Kindercrafts

ee Tree

Posted on by Mrs. Malo

I just love it when I come up with a great lesson for my  Kinder class and it works well from start to finish!  Today I had one of those lessons.  One of the blogs I frequently follow is Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas and she has had a few great posts on activities to do with word families.  I have been wanting to try and work some fun word family activities in with my class and had a great opportunity today.

Our focus for the month of December has been around a great book: A Porcupine in a Pine Tree – A Canadian 12 Days of Christmas by Helaine Becker and illustrated by Werner Zimmermann.  We are doing some a great sequencing and counting activity that I will blog about later but from this book our focus has expanded to include all Christmas Trees.

I started today by reading the book The Little Christmas Tree by Karl Ruhmann and illustrated by Anne Moller.  This is a cute book about a tree that doesn’t feel special in the forest among the large majestic trees but knows that some day it will get it’s chance to shine.  As I read along with discussing key illustrations and themes in the story we pointed out words with the ‘ee’ sound, a sound that we learned in our Jolly Phonics program last week.  After we sang the song  “I’m a little pine tree”, to the tune of “I’m a Little Teapot”:

I’m a little pine tree as you can see,

All the other pine trees are bigger than me.

Maybe when I’m grown up I will be,

A great big Merry Christmas tree.

We circled all of the ‘ee’ sounds in the song and then I told them we were going to make a craft to learn more words with the ‘ee’ sound.

There was a bit of prep on my part for this activity, so it didn’t take all day.  I had already cut out for each student: a green tree, a star, and four circles with ee words (free, tree, see, and bee).  For each word there was a circle with the complete word, and a circle with the ee missing.

Students started by printing their names on the back of their tree and the ‘ee’ on their star.  I came around with a black marker and made their ee’s brighter.  This gave me the opportunity to help those students who struggle printing lower case e’s but they still had to make an attempt themselves.  Next we glued our stars at the top of the tree.  One word at at time students glued the word on the tree and then the circle with the part of the word (missing the ee) on top so they could ‘peak-a-boo’ under the circle to see the complete word.  After a few glue mishaps with completely cover the word most students figured it out and the trees were a success.

While they were in gym today I glued the “I’m a Little Pine tree” song on the back of the tree along with a small homework assignment.  I asked them to talk with their parents and see if they could list any other works with ‘ee’ in them.  Then they were to circle any that had the ‘ee’ and the end and therefore rhymed with the word tree.  I am interested to see what they come back with on Monday.

I will definitely be doing more activities like this one.  I am thinking ‘og’ words around Groundhog day, and ‘ar’ words when we are studying space in February (star).

Posted in Books

Mickey Saves Santa

Posted on by Mrs. Malo

Eileen was thrilled that our book on December 5th was her pick: Mickey Saves Santa from the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse series.

Monday nights are busy for us so I picked a fun book with a fun simple activity.  This is no literary masterpiece but it is a fun themed book that Eileen loved.  You can easily tell that is is based on a television episode because the story is choppy and you can tell there are parts missing.  Mrs. Claus show up at the clubhouse announcing that Santa needs help or he will not be able to deliver presents.  They could have been more creative with his problem than simply a broken harness but Eileen didn’t seem to care.  Included in the book were over 25 stickers and two paper ornaments to stick them on.  The girls enjoyed making them and hanging them on the tree.

These ornaments were not the activity I had planned but I let them make them anyway.  After I put on Christmas music from a Disney CD I had picked up a couple of years ago: Disney’s Santa Time.  It is not an easy CD to find but it is one of our favourites.  My absolute favourite song is called “Stars” and I have never been able to find it anywhere but on this album.  I put the music on and let the kids dance for a few minutes before winding down for bed.