We started our day by reading The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg. This is such an amazing story to read to students this age. To see the wonder and excitement in their eyes when we show the bell that Santa gave to us to share with them really sparks your Christmas spirit!
As a writing activity, the students needed to recall and choose a favorite part in the story. We really got the students to stretch their thinking to specific moments. Many of them liked the train or the bell. With encouragement, they were able to give the exact moment from the book such as when they drank hot chocolate on the train or when the little boy opened the bell on Chirstmas morning. We are working very hard on getting the students to meet the common core standards of supporting their ideas and responses with specific information from the given text. I was pleased to see how well they were able to do this with a much more complicated text.
We followed up with independent work that included activities for handwriting, cutting, word work, shapes and letter recognition.
For snack, we made Polar Express Hot Chocolate and train treats which were both inspired from pinterest.
The occupational therapist pushes into our classroom every other day and today was her day. We put a model of a train on our SMART board. The students needed to cut out given shapes and use those to build the train. Then could then color the train anyway they would like.
The following amazing bloggers helped us create this fun, festive and educational day!
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