The Destitute Teacher

I love celebrating Christmas with my class, and last year was the first year in a while that I had a whole class who celebrate Christmas too! In the term three school holidays I put together a Christmas kit of activities that I could whip out in the last week of school... and I was so glad that I did! The students loved the new activities and were highly engaged in them- surprising as the end of the year can be so rough on tempers.  It also meant that I could work through the classroom and pack away our usual classroom resources/ activities for the end of the year. The extra time to do this was invaluable! In the kit was a couple of activities I would put out before school/ Discovery time or throughout the day, a set of Literacy based activities and a set of Maths activities. This post focusses on the before school activities... below are links to all the resources! I wish I could find my photos, but I will try take some more for you. I've tried to keep costs to a minimum but I did...

I am slowly working my way through a massive backlog of posts that I have photographed and never done anything with.... Last year I made myself a vow that I would try and MAKE each of my students a little Christmas gift for them each at the end of the year. After much to-ing and fro-ing, I decided on CROCHET gifts, as there had been a wooly theme in the classroom. I found a super cute and super easy pattern for crochet monsters here . They work up quickly and it was a relatively painless process to make 21 of the little darlings. I started during the Term 3 holidays and gradually picked at the project. These little monsters were packaged up with a 3B1 notebook (which I bulk buy in the stationery sales at the start of the year... 5 cents each!), a pencil, and an eraser. The kids loved receiving them almost as much as I loved making and giving them. I also put together a simple theme for the chocolate gifts I gave to teacher aides, co-workers etc.... brown paper, twine and a little c...