Gingerbread Printables

One of the new items in my Teacher Stores is my Gingerbread Printables.  There are several fun items in this set which center around two basic Gingerbread Themes:

One is a Gingerbread House Building Theme.  Decorating Gingerbread houses is one of our favorite holiday activities.  So, along that theme I wrote up my favorite way of making easy "gingerbread" houses for a class to decorate:

I also included a "Have Your Ever Made a Gingerbread House" graphing printable for printing out and making this graph with a class:

To prepare for this graph and to promote language at home about this subject, I made up a Take-Home 

paper for students to fill in for their parents:

For after the decorating activity, I made up a paper for students to draw pictures of their building experiences and either journal about it, or dictate their experiences to a teacher:

In our class we also like to taste real gingerbread, and we graph who likes that and who does not:

For after the graph, there is a "Graph Data Recording Sheet", where older students can record the results of the graph, draw faces to go with the recorded numbers, and indicate where they might be on the graph:

Finally, there is a take-home paper for the students to show their parents about the day's tasting experience.  I feel like any way I can promote language experiences with my students at home is valuable, and I hope these pages will do just that.

 So stop by the stores at Teacher's Notebook and Teachers Pay Teachers and see the fun Gingerbread Items, and remember they are on sale through Tuesday!

A Sale in the Teacher Stores

Well, it seems that every store and website all around me is having a sale, so I decided to get in the spirit and join in. You can find all of the items in my stores on sale for five days - Saturday, Sunday and Monday at Teacher's Notebook, and Monday and Tuesday at Teacher's Pay Teachers.

I've been busy putting some new and fun items on the store shelves, and I'll tell you about the first of those tomorrow morning.  

So, I hope you stop by the stores, and Happy Shopping!

Tasting Cranberry Sauce in Preschool

Are you buying any cranberry sauce this week for your Thanksgiving dinner?  I have to admit that this is something that I usually would leave off my list if I were in charge of the Thanksgiving shopping.  My only associations with cranberry sauce are the ones of the molded, gelatinous cylindrical shape that you wiggle out of the can.

However, I decided that the Little People should taste cranberry sauce this year to see if they would like it.  Admittedly, part of the reason was that I had already made this printable that is part of the Thanksgiving Activity Pack in my Teachers Stores:

I got the printable ready, so I was halfway there.  I then ran across this jar of sauce during our last trip to Trader Joe's, so I went ahead and purchased it for the tasting.

We decided that we wouldn't just serve the sauce without anything else, so we served it on Ritz crackers.  Which, now that I think about it, might have influenced the voting a little bit.

Here is the chart pre-voting:

Here is the chart after voting:

I certainly was surprised at the results.  But then again, I tasted the sauce myself and thought it was pretty good.  So I brought it home and we're saving it for Thursday.

Would they have voted differently if it were the traditional wibble-wobble can-shaped mass?  I don't know.  I just know that in this case, the Little People have spoken, and the result is:

Thumbs up for cranberry sauce.

Christmas Items in the Teacher Stores

 New in the teacher stores....

 In the pack you will get the pdf files to print:

Two 11"x 17" patterning cards for completing ABAB and ABCABC patterns:

Decorated Christmas Tree Math/Playdough Mats in both 11" x 17" and 8.5" x 11" sizes:

"Naked" Christmas Tree Math/Playdough Mats in both 11" x 17" and 8.5" x 11" sizes:

Decorated Gingerbread House Math/Playdough Mats in both 11" x 17" and 8.5" x 11" sizes:

"Naked" Gingerbread House Math/Playdough Mats in both 11" x 17" and 8.5" x 11" sizes:

 Three 11" x 17" Cookie Sheet Math Mat with Cookies (just waiting for "decorations"):

 Two 11" x 17" Cookie Sheet Math Mat without Cookies:

 Nineteen 4.25"x 5.5" Christmas Vocabulary Cards:

Ten 4.25" x 5.5" Christmas "Clothespin Counting" Cards:

Printable "Five Little Christmas Trees" Pocket Chart:

Hot Chocolate Math Grid Game with Instructions and Marshmallow Cards:

Sugar Cookie Math Grid Game with Instructions and  Candy Cards:

It's a lot of fun files for just $8.00.  You can find it here and here.  Thanks for looking!

"Who Picked a Pumpkin?" Class Book

Here is another book that I just finished.  It has pictures from our "Pumpkin Party" on Halloween.  Since our field trip budget was completely cut this year and we could not visit the pumpkin patch, we decided to bring the pumpkins to the room instead.  Everyone got to pick one to take home, which led to this class book:

The book pages are die cut shapes cut from poster board.

I like to print the captions for the book on labels.  Not only does it make it look neat and clean, I can use the file from year to year.  I just change the name of the students each year.

At the end of the year I add these individual pages to everyone's End of Year memory book.  That was it's a two-for-one deal:  a class book for during the year, and another addition to their memory book.

A pumpkin picked a pumpkin! Ha!

Making Stone Soup in Preschool

I've been catching up on making some class books the past few days.  It seems like both October, November and December have a lot of activities that we like to make books out of.  Plus, the Little People love to read class books that have their pictures in them.

One that I finished today is the story of how we made Stone Soup last week.  This was a great activity.  We read the actual Stone Soup book first, and then talked about how we were going to make our own Stone Soup at the end of the week.  We told them that everyone could bring one thing to put in the soup.

The Little People were all over it, and it turned out wonderfully.  Here is our book describing the activity:

The way that I spelled "travellers" with two "l"s stresses me out a little bit, but apparently the British write it this way, so we'll just say it's jolly good.

These are pictures of them frowning and saying "No!"  They loved that part.

In hindsight, I really wish we had taken a picture of the stone in the pot.

Actually, some people said that they liked the stone/water combination just fine. (Oops, wrong answer.)  We tried to get them to see that while it tasted like fine water, it wasn't very good soup.

Every Little Person brought something for the soup.  I cooked the raw vegetables the night before we made the soup, and we put everyone's contribution in a cup so they could add it to the pot as we acted out the story (made the soup).

We also let those who brought bowls and crackers put some things in, too.

Remarkably, almost all of the Little People gave the soup a "thumbs up".  Yes, there were some "no, thank yous", but it was a very small percentage.

 Granted, it wasn't the prettiest class book I've ever made, but the Little People don't seem to care about that.  They only seem to care about seeing pictures of the day they made soup - and Stone Soup at that!