Reindeer Games

I am running out of Christmas ideas and we still have 4 days of school left! :/ As I mentioned before, this week has been NUTS. Every day we have had to drop what we were working on multiple time to go jump on stage and practice our Christmas program song or go get our vision tested or take pictures with Santa. Last night we finally had our Christmas performance and, as usual, everything came together perfectly at the last minute and it was adorable and the parents loved it.

Amidst all of the madness, we were able to do a mini unit on Reindeer that I wanted to share. We started off the day by reading Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and singing his song together. (If you don't have your own copy of the book you can read it online for free on wegivebooks.com).
Then, I asked the kids to tell me what they already knew about Reindeer and we made a little chart of information.

(One of them said, "they smell better than people!!??", and, while I appreciated the Frozen reference, I told her that that was just a joke from the movie and that it is most likely not true - Sorry!)

After that we watched a video, looked at pictures, and read the information on the San Diego Zoo Kids page about Reindeer.

Then we talked about the new information that we learned about Reindeer and I passed out these All About Reindeer writing pages and told them to write me a report including everything that they knew about the animal. Some of them did a really awesome job!!

After they finished writing we did this cute little Reindeer craft to frame our writing before hanging it up for everyone to see.

The writing pages and craft template came from the Reindeer Games packet made by A Cupcake for the Teacher.

Gingerbread Day

Today in Kindergarten we celebrated Gingerbread Day. No, it's not an actual holiday (as far as I know), but I figured since we have been doing so much about Jesus and the Nativity story and Santa Clause and Winter that we should do something a little bit different today. Plus, I found some great freebies to use along with several of the gingerbread books that I already have in my classroom library. (Win, Win!) Of course, our plans for the day were interrupted by vision testing and practice for our Christmas program, but we still managed to squeeze in a good amount of gingerbread fun.

In the morning, I explained that we would be talking about Gingerbread people all day today and we talked a bit about what gingerbread is, what it tastes like, who has had it before, who hasn't had it but thinks that their mom or sister has, etc... Then, I reminded them that we have been learning to retell stories in three parts: beginning, middle, and end. I told them that we were going to read a story called Gingerbread Baby and that they needed to pay close attention so that they would be able to draw me a picture of each part of the story.

After reading the book, they completed this free worksheet from Rowdy in Room 300.

(There is a free pack of worksheets to go along with this book at homeschoolcreations.com.)

Later we read The Gingerbread Kid Goes to School and Gingerbread Pirates. Afterwards we talked about what kind of gingerbread we would want to make and they drew their own gingerbread men and women using this free template from Simply Kinder.

Then we used this cute paper from the Creative Classroom to write a Missing poster for the Gingerbread men and women that they created.

For more great Gingerbread ideas and activities check out the 2014 Gingerbread Exchange post on Simply Kinder's blog!