A Bit of This and That

Thanks to all of you who offered to come and bake with us! I am just going through emails and will be notifying 2 of you with a time. There, once again, was overwhelming response to the call for volunteers that I'm thinking of making class baking a monthly event in the New Year. Stay tuned (in January) for a sign up to help bake with us!

Some proud kids wanting to share their building.

We rotated through stations in the gym today. Apparently I need to learn about choosing a different setting for my iPhone camera because these are really blurry pictures! But I included them so that you can see the kinds of things we were doing today....

We all gathered on the floor today to draw some gingerbread men. We worked through the process step-by-step and then painted the men later. Some kids chose to cut their men out themselves and others were happy to pass on that task. The gingerbread men are ready to be decorated next week!

Here they are, still on the baking sheet, fresh from the oven.

Also, for those of you wondering, the cinnamon/applesauce ornaments worked! I baked them at a low heat for a looooong time and they are hard and solid now. Wow! Also, they are waiting to be decorated!

Pinterest Made Me Do It!

So, I saw on Pinterest that you can make Christmas decorations using two ingredients: Apple sauce and cinnamon. So we had to give it a try. 

Here we are taking turns stirring the "dough"...everyone who wanted a turn took a turn.

Later in the day, we rolled out the dough and cut shapes with cookie cutters. I couldn't take photos because my hands were too cinnamony.

For our alphabet stations today, we did some old activities and some new ones.

Here we are matching lower case letters to capital letters and naming the letters as we worked. (This activity should look very familiar to one of our moms because she made it! Thanks!)

Here we are matching letters to the picture that begins with that letter to put the puzzle together. We also tried to remember to name all the letters. One group finished quickly and then decided to put the puzzle in ABC order...wow!

matching and naming letters

Naming letters and putting them in ABC order.

Practicing our printing. Kids were asked to print their names with a capital letter followed by lower case letters. Or, they could have chosen to work in printing a variety of lines and circles to prepare for printing. Some did a combination of both. I've blurred out the name printing in the interest of online safety. Believe me, the printing was pretty spectacular!

Wow, we were hard at work today!