Decorating Gingerbread Cookies

A few pictures from our gingerbread cookie decorating experience this afternoon:

Gingerbread, Kilkees and Pulla!

Today we were fortunate to taste some more great food.  We had delicious gingerbread cookies, kilkees (kind of like lazy perogies) with a yummy cheese sauce and pulla (sweet bread from Finland spiced with cardamom).  Special thanks to Anne's mom for baking the pulla for us to taste and telling us about how children in Finland celebrate Christmas.

Tomorrow we will be decorating our gingerbread cookies!

Math work - using an unsharpened pencil to compare length

Learning about special Christmas food in Finland

Tasting pulla!

Pulla

Gingerbread door to our classroom!  The gingerbread people are glyphs that we made this afternoon.  

Art work - fish painted with primary and secondary colours

Crazy Cats

Students drew cats with different kinds of lines and designs.

Letters from Santa and Crazy Hair and PJ Day!

As Christmas holidays draw near, students are getting very excited! Yesterday they received letters from Santa and today was Pajama and Crazy Hair Day!

Students opening their letters from Santa Claus!

PJ and Crazy Hair Day!

In our Writing workshop we have been working on a Christmas alphabet.  Each day we write about a different symbol of Christmas.  Today we wrote about presents.

A special thank you to those parents who have sent special foods for us to taste as part of our Traditions and Celebrations unit.  We have had lefse, black olives, waffle cookies and we're looking forward to a few more tasty treats later this week!

In Math we are doing a mini-unit on measuring length by comparing objects using words like longer, shorter, taller and bigger.  After Christmas we will be learning about addition and subtraction.

Bump!

Students practiced their adding skills by learning and playing a math game called Bump.  They used either 2, 3 or 4 dice, depending on which gameboard they were playing.  They would find the sum of their dice, then cover up that number on their gameboard.  If they got the same number as the other player, they could "bump" their marker off the board and put theirs in that place.  As we played, students discovered that they could add more quickly by counting on and combining dice.  For example, if they rolled a 4, 1, 5 and 3, their thinking might be:  4 and 1 is 5, 5 and 5 is 10, 10 and 3 is 13!

(You can find a variety of Bump games on the internet that you can download for free.  Just search in Google images: "Bump math games free printables".)