Digital Holiday Story Books

Today I'm here to share with you a favorite holiday project in my classroom. During the holidays, it's really difficult to keep the kids engaged/focused…but this project is always a hit! Kids beg to work on it -- and are dead silent and hard at work while doing so.  Here's a sample of a completed project! To begin, students worked with a partner to fill out their story map. 

They brainstormed ideas and had to come to an agreement before filling out their story map. From there, they went on to the actual writing of their stories. The kids knew what their end product would be--so while they work on their writing, they are also planning out which sentences will go on what page. Students were so excited about this part and couldn't wait to get into the lab! 

Click here to download the story map. Once students were done with the writing, we went into the lab so they could begin creating their digital story books. For this project, we used the program Pixie.  This is an awesome program because students were able to link up computer screens with their partners--so that they could both work on the illustrations at the same time. There are also many different clip art pieces the kids can use.

It took awhile for the kids to learn to work together on this program. Since most of them chose to work on the same page at the same time, they would often go and change out little images their partner had placed…or change the color of the text, etc. After awhile though, they figured out how to work together to compromise. 

Since we could only work on this program in the computer lab, and that we had a limited number of days to work on it, this was incentive enough to get the kids to not argue and finish up their work in the given amount of time. 

During the last week of school, we popped popcorn and watched all of the holiday movies! The kiddos LOVED it. Here's one more: This was a great activity to do to keep the kids engaged during the holidays, but really, this could be enjoyed at any time throughout the year!  I'd love to know if you end up doing this with your kiddos :)  Happy Teaching!

Holiday Gifts

Happy December, Friends! 

Today I am linking up with my blogging buddies from the Elementary Grapevine to present to you a Holiday Blog Hop!!

Today I will be sharing some gift ideas with you that I have done in the past.

Student Gifts

Each year, I order books from Scholastic and stock up on the multiplication flash cards from the Target dollar section. I will usually add in a candy cane, Christmas pencil, and some type of holiday straw into their gift bags. 

I also bake these melted snowman cookies for them. 

If you would like detailed directions on how to create these cookies, as well as an awesome sugar cookie recipe you can check out this post.

If you're interested in using these editable cookie bag toppers, you can download a free copy in my TPT store.

Parent Gifts

Each year my students make snowman finger printed ornaments to gift to their families. It is super simple and easy. I purchase clear plastic ornaments (because the glass ones easily shatter) and fill them with glitter (fake snow).

Faculty Gifts

I usually like to give something small to the office staff, custodians, counselors, etc. They help to ensure the school runs smoothly but often get overlooked. It can get a bit pricy when purchasing something for all of these people, so I usually like to bake something. 

One year I made some chocolate covered pretzels and decorated them with sprinkles. In addition I baked some brownies and added some candy canes to this cute holiday box and then tied it up with a cute bow.

Another idea is to make some puppy chow, add some holiday m&ms and throw them into a Mason Jar. This comes out SUPER CUTE and who doesn't like puppy chow?! 

In the back row of the photo above, I also used some large Mason jars and added dry cookie ingredients. I decided to do M&M cookies, since they're much more colorful than plain chocolate chips (although I believe they have red and green chocolate chips now!) 

I added some ribbon and tied on directions on how to prep. the cookies (along with the wet ingredients needed). You can snag the labels I used here. 

I hope you are able to use some of these ideas this holiday season! All of these gifts are easily adaptable for anyone :) What are your go-to holiday gifts? I'd love to hear in the comment section below! 

Head on over to Lory's blog to find out about Classroom Snowball Fights!! 

Valentine's Day Compliment Poster Projects!

I survived Valentine's Day 2014!!!

Luckily, we actually had a VERy mellow day thanks to my sweet friend and blogging buddy Tonya from Tonya's Treats for Teachers . She shared an amazing idea with me about a project that she has been doing with her kiddos for the past 4 years on Valentine's Day. You can check her original blog post out {here}. 

Once I heard about this super cute and awesome idea I just knew I HAD to do it in my classroom!! 

I gave my kids about 3 weeks to work on 'Part 1' of their V-day Project at home for homework. Part 1 required them to write a sweet and meaningful compliment to each of their classmates. We really spent the time talking about what a meaningful compliment was and talked about how totally lame it would be to get 24 cards that said 'You are nice'. 

Part 2 of this project was a mystery and I told my students they would learn more about it on Valentine's Day…BUT they needed to finish Part 1 to hear about Part 2!

They were sooooo excited about this project and really worked hard on it. I shared with Tonya how adorable some of my kids were because they would ask if they could stay in during recess to work on writing their cards. I even had a handful of boys who wanted to stay in (and they NEVER want to stay in) during recess- I was totally shocked when I saw one of them carefully coloring and decorating each card he wrote! 

This year, I went out and bought all of our supplies to complete Part 2 of our project. I wanted to kick myself as I was cleaning up (at then end of the day) because I forgot about an entire bag full of stickers I had bought to us- but forgot to put out. Oh well, I will just use them next year :) 

Once I got in all of my students Compliment Cards I separated them by student and put them all into baggies. 

The students then randomly chose a bag out of my basket and created a Compliment Poster (with all the sweet notes from classmates) for whichever student they chose. So if Bryanna chose Kelly- she made a poster for Kelly with the notes from all of our classmates (and me!). 

I wish I could have captured a photo to show you all when I told them about Part 2. Because it was a 'mystery' up until V-day, they had no idea what they were doing. They were completely stoked to be getting a FULL SIZE poster board to decorate and that they could go crazy with their supplies and the supplies I had purchased. 

They were required to arrange their cards (index cards) to ensure enough space before gluing. They also had to find room to decorate the persons name onto the poster… 

Once everyone was done, they each had a chance to come up in front of the class to present their posters to their classmates. It was really fun and everyone (including myself) was super excited to find out who made their poster!! 

 They all came out sooo cute!! 

I especially loved the sweet notes I got from the students!! Some of them literally made me laugh out loud!! :D 

'I hope you find a good man' 

This was another really sweet note. Thank you for the compliment sweet child, but really?! Never Retire?! You must be kidding! lol 

I hope you also had a great Valentine's Day!! 

Christmas in Paradise Giveaway!

Hi there and Happy Wednesday to you!

Today I am teaming up with some amazing teacher bloggers that also come from the beautiful state of Hawaii! We have an extra special Christmas in Paradise Giveaway for you!

In this Giveaway, you have the chance to win seven different holiday/tropical themed goodies, plus a fancy new pencil sharpener from Classroom Friendly Supplies!  Click on the images below to check out each product's description on TpT {and to add them to your wishlist in case you don't win!!}

I have also decided to add a little mystery holiday product in for whoever wins this Giveaway :) I'll actually be sending the winner TWO products-not just one ;)

Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

DIY December Linky #1: Melted Snowman Cookies

Happy Sunday!

This month I have been doing a lot of DIY and baking projects for the holidays. I decided that I wanted to share it with you all and since I know that you are all a bunch of creative and crafty teachers- I want to see what you've been DIY-ing this month! SO..I present to you a brand new Linky:

Yesterday, my baking buddy and I  (another teacher) got together to make some Melted Snowman Cookies for our students. 

I absolutely love baking and decorating cookies, so this was a totally fun project for me! 

We started off by making our sugar cookies from scratch. This was my first time making sugar cookies and it was pretty easy! I have a really yummy recipe if you're interested. 

Click the photo above to download a copy of this recipe :) 

We then used circle cutters to cut the dough-then baked the cookies. 

The cookies will need to stay in the oven for a bit longer than the 15 minutes the recipe suggests. We just took a peek into the oven to make sure they were browned around the edges. These are what our pre-decorated cookies looked like. 

We then made our frosting using water, meringue powder, and some powdered sugar. 

We had to experiment better with how we liked the frosting. As you can see..we originally tried frosting the entire cookie-but didn't like that. We ended up using a plastic baggie to outline the melted snow look. Make sure to pop the marshmallows on before your frosting hardens. 

We then added some food coloring to the frosting-and used plastic bags (instead of piping bags) to draw on the eyes, nose, arms, and buttons. 

You could get fancy and add scarves, bows, and earmuffs but we were running low on frosting since we made 75 cookies! 

We then bagged each cookie into a plastic Ziplock Sandwich bag..and added these cute topper tags. I absolutely love how they turned out! It makes the packaging look much fancier!

The back of the tag also lists the ingredients.

If you're interested in using these tags-you can download them for free in my TPT Store. This is an editable file (for ingredients and teacher name). Please leave some feedback if you do decide to use these tags :) 

If you'd like to share any of your DIY Holiday Projects from this month-or from the past I would love for you to link up below! I always love getting new ideas and definitely would like to add some new projects to my to-do list! If you don't have a blog-feel free to leave your ideas in the comment section :) 

Thank you for sharing and Happy DIY-ing!

Rules for this Linky:

1. Link the picture of your project to your blog post. 

2. Add the DIY December Linky button to your blog post with a link back to my page. 

3. Check out the other DIY Projects and leave some cheerful comments

Thanks so much for linking up!!