We had such a fun day pretending to be on the Polar Express. The kids came dressed in their pajamas and we started the day getting our tickets punched to board the train! We watched the story online and the kids loved feeling like they were actually on the train.
We enjoyed fun activities like making our own train and drinking hot chocolate.
We have been learning about the different Christmas traditions celebrated among people. We learned that Hanukkah means the festival of light and people that celebrate Hanukkah light a Menorah with a candle called the Shamash. We made a Menorah out of our hand prints and also made our own dreidels. The kids learned how to play with a dreidel and enjoyed playing with their tables.
The next celebration we learned about was Las Posadas. It is a nine day celebration full of parties, piñatas and food! We looked at pictures of what the people wear when they celebrate Las Posadas. They wear serapes and we were able to make our own serapes and go to different kindergarten rooms asking if they had room for us to enjoy a party! We ended up in our own room enjoying cookies and watching a story online called Too Many Tamales.
Here we are in our serapes!
This past week we learned all about the Gingerbread Man! We read many different versions of The Gingerbread Man and compared what was the same and what was different. The students also got to create their own ending to the story in a creative writing/drawing. I will upload a video of this soon!
The first activity we did focused on our five senses. The kids helped me fill in this gingerbreads fives senses and then they got to make their own!
Hear: Jingle Bells
See: Googly Eyes
Smell: Cotton ball with perfume on it
Taste: Peppermint
Touch: Tissue Paper
We read the book Gingerbread Friends by Jan Brett. In this version of The Gingerbread Man, the gingerbread man doesn’t get eaten but instead finds a gingerbread house with more gingerbread people! To illustrate this, we made our own gingerbread houses. We outlined the house with white crayon and then used construction paper to make the candy. They are all so unique!
Here they are hard at work!
We also did a gingerbread glyph. The students decorated their gingerbread man according to the glyph we followed. Then they got to paint and “sew” him up!
To finish our gingerbread man unit up, we measured how tall we were compared to the gingerbread man using peppermints. I have pictures but they are on my other computer—so hopefully I can post those soon! The kids loved seeing how many peppermints tall they were and it was a fun way to talk about the words shorter and taller. They had to do this worksheet and draw how many peppermints tall the gingerbread man was and how many peppermints tall they were. This is how it turned out:
And of course, we had to top it all off with a gingerbread man cookie.
