Grinch Party

Last year the kids and I had "Grinch Party" where we watched the original cartoon, and had some grinchy snacks. This year I'd like to expand it to a "Grinch Day" and include more fun activities! So, I've been looking around and here are some great ideas that I've found to include in our "Grinch Day!"

Of course you start with the book and watch the movie at some point during the day!
(Click the pictures below to grab them from Amazon if you need a copy!)

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Grinch Kabobs - This is one we did last year and the kids loved it! You can have all the ingredients ready, and let the kids assemble their own Grinch kabobs on a toothpick. 

Of course you have to have a drink! You can use a lemon-lime soda (or koolaid) and add green food coloring, or you can throw in some lime sherbet for a little more of a sweet treat!

Pin the Heart on the Grinch Game

Grinch Dust - Students can also make their own Grinch dust by shaking up some sugar and green food coloring in a Ziploc bag. Then add the directions (found online) to the top!

Play Doh Challenge - Divide the class into groups and give each group a set of materials (playdoh, buttons, cotton, string, etc.) and have each group make their best representation of the Grinch. Then have all the students vote on the best one!

And finally, to incorporate some writing into your day, you can do this cute craftivity where the students write about a way they would make the Grinch grin! What a cute bulletin board display.

{I only found this picture as an image online, so I apologize for not giving a link or credit to anyone!}



Gingerbread Man Free Activities

Today I'm sharing with you 7 FREE activities in this fun Gingerbread Man Activity Pack. Included are an emergent reader, color by code pictures, math practice and more!

Click the pictures below to download!

These are taken from my larger Gingerbread Man Pack which you can find HERE!

These pages are great to work on after reading a gingerbread story. Here are some of our favorites:

Mrs. Thompson's Treasures is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.

Thanksgiving Activities: Turkey Time!

This week was all about turkeys! We started off by reading Turkey Trouble by Wendi Silvano. Such a cute book! Then we spent the week doing all kinds of fun turkey activities incorporating math, language arts, science, and art!

We summarized the story using this freebie from Rowdy in Room 300.

and did this free sequencing activity  from Kimberly Miner.

I made up 5 sentences about the story, then cut them up and paper clipped each sentence together with a number on it. Then I recorded myself reading the sentence correctly onto my phone, and the kids listened to the recording while putting the sentence together in the pocket chart.



You can get your own copy of this cute book here:

Mrs. Thompson's Treasures is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to  amazon.com.

Of course we had to disguise our own turkeys! This is the first year we tried it and I love how they turned out. 

We made a Can-Have-Are chart to learn about real turkeys. I just cut the head and feathers from construction paper and glued them on the back. 

For some math fun, we did some color by addition pages, and also this activity from Miss Kindergarten called My Turkey Family. We practiced drawing turkeys and got some practice skip counting as well!

Something I love doing with the kids is directed drawing. We've only done a few, mostly because I keep forgetting, but we got one in this week. They are great for kids to practice listening, following directions, and learning some basic art skills. Here is one for a cartoon turkey from Art Projects for Kids. Click the picture to visit her blog and get a free pdf tutorial. 

Here is how ours turned out!

I love how festive our wall looks now with all our turkey stuff!

Thanksgiving Close Reading Freebies

Just a quick post to share with you my newest free resource! I've compiled a Thanksgiving Close Reading Pack!

The sample includes 4 different levels of a fiction Thanksgiving story. Students will read the passage, answer the questions using text evidence, and make inferences and text-to-self connections! There is something for everyone! CLICK HERE to grab it now and let your students give it a try!

Check out some of our favorite Thanksgiving books!

 

                

 Mrs. Thompson's Treasures is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.

Schoolroom, Surgery, and Baby!

Wow, it has been a crazy last couple of months for our family! You may know we moved overseas back in August, and were living in a small apartment until we could get our visas and find a house to rent. We finally found a great house and moved in about a month ago.

My favorite part of the house is that I have an entire room dedicated for homeschool!! I am so grateful for this space that we have, and we finally have it all set up. Pretty much every piece of furniture came from IKEA.

 

Since it's technically a bedroom, there are built in closets, giving me lots of storage space! And to be honest, it's nice that I can hide stuff away and not worry about it all being super organized and cute :-) I also got a pocket chart for the first time! I love using it with my kindergartener. There are so many activities we can do with it.

 

 

 

In addition to moving, I was diagnosed with acute appendicitis and had an emergency appendectomy two weeks ago. It's a fairly common procedure, but I am also 24 weeks pregnant with little treasure #5, so that made things a little more complicated. Thankfully, everything went well and I have pretty much fully recovered already.

 

We had to take a few days off of school during my surgery and recovery, but we always make time to read books! My kids love "A Pie Went By" by Carolyn Dunn. It's a silly story, but great for rhyming, repetition, and sequencing. There is a recipe for King Bing's cherry pie in the book, so we made that one night. Anything for those text to self connections :)



Tricks and Treats Blog Hop

This month we are bringing you some fun Tricks & Treats for your classroom! Be sure to hop around all the different blogs and get some great ideas and freebies!



Who doesn't love pumpkins? I'm going to share with you today how to have a fun day of investigating pumpkins, while also incorporating language arts, math, science, and art!  

Here's what our day looked like:

Each of the kids got their own small pumpkin to investigate. First we talked about words that describe the outside of the pumpkin and the kids drew a picture on their investigation sheets. This is a great way to review adjectives and other descriptive language.

 

The kids made predictions about their pumpkins and wrote them down. We predicted what the inside looks like, whether it would sink or float, how many seeds are inside, weight and height, and the length around.

 

Next, we did some investigations to find out the facts!

Finding weight by measuring the kids with the pumpkin and without! Great way to incorporate more math!

Counting seeds by making groups of 10

 

We wrote the findings on the second investigation worksheet.

You can grab these worksheets for free HERE.

 

The cleaning out and counting seeds took awhile since I had to help them all with it, so if this is an activity you want to do with a classroom of students, I would suggest doing it in groups with parent volunteers!

  

 

For a fun art project, we decided to use some of the seeds for a pumpkin craft!

 

First we dyed the seeds by putting some in a plastic bag and adding a small splash of vinegar and food coloring! We made green, orange, and brown (red, green, and yellow food coloring). The kids had fun squishing the seeds inside the bags to coat them.

 

Next we laid them out on paper towels to dry. It took several hours, so we ended up finishing the craft the next day.

 

 

I printed out a pumpkin outline I found online, and had the kids cut it out and glue it on their choice of colored paper. Then we just glued the seeds on to make the pumpkin!

You can grab the pumpkin investigation sheets that we used HERE!

I also have several pumpkin freebies in my TpT store! Get each one by clicking the picture.

 

 

 

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