Our Elf on the Shelf

The first thing the children do when they come in each day is look for Trinity, our Elf. They don't take off their coats, hang up their book bags or even say hello to me (OK, some do, followed by "Where's Trinity?"). It is so much fun. Let me share some photos with you.

Taking a little nap after a long flight back from the North Pole!

I found Trinity taking a bubble bath in my coffee cup! The kids thought this was too funny!

This morning Trinity was sporting a new sweater and hat. She also left us a note! She is hanging out on the Smart Board watching all the awesome kids!

 I got this cute little chalk board from World Market this weekend.  I also found a lot of minitures that I am going to us as props for our Elf all week.  I got little mixing bowls and wisk (she is going to be making gingerbread cookies!), little colored pencils, miniture gingerbread men and a few other little goodies.  Thought I would share my find with you.

Elves and Gingerbread Stories!

Our Elf has been so busy this week! She has been seen ballooning over the library area and hanging out in dramatic play sipping on syrup. The kids are loving having Trinity visiting from the North Pole.

We have been very busy learning about Elves and Gingerbread. In Reading Workshop we are working on comparing and contrasting the different Gingerbread books. So far we have read The Gingerbread Man, The Gingerbread Cowboy, The Gingerbread Pirates, The Gingerbread Kid at School. I have been amazed at what a wonderful job the children are doing finding similarities and differences in the books. They are noticing sentence structure, patterns, word differences, the different color schemes used by the illustrators and so much more. We are also using this information to strengthen our research, graphing and data collection skills. The children voted today on their favorite story so far. See if you can figure out which one was the favorite so far.



We have been working on following directions, multi-step directions, letter formation, putting spaces between our words, exploring character traits and writing sentences. Our Elf project is an activity that requires the students to use all of the above mentioned skills in order to create their own Elf. The topic is "What would your name be if you were an Elf?" We are working on this during small group time during afternoon Center Time. Here are some pictures of the first group working on the project.
BTW, you can
                  Get The Project Here from A Cupcake For The Teacher on Teachers Pay Teachers

The many pieces are laid out and labeled so the children know how many of each piece to collect.

Next they had to listen to oral directions so they could assemble the elf correctly.

The children worked on fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination, sentence construction and receptive/expressive language skills while assembling their elves.

I brought out the glitter glue so the kids could add some festive sparkle to their elves.

Here is mine and the first group's finished elves!

I can tell that I need to pull a strategy group to reteach line spacing for capital and lower case letters. We are just now starting to use lined paper on some of our writing projects. This skill will take a lot of practice. I am proud to see many of the children using capital and lower case letters, putting spaces between their words and thinking about punctuation. Every month I try to do a project like this with the class to give them a lot of practice listening to and following directions.