Christmas Characters...

We had a fun English lesson yesterday using...

...Jingle Bells, Homework Smells
by
Diane deGroat.

In the story, the students were given
a homework assignment to draw a picture
of their favorite
MAIN CHARACTER
from a story.

Gilbert
(the MAIN CHARACTER of
Jingle Bells, Homework Smells)
decided to draw...

...Santa as his favorite MAIN CHARACTER
from
The Night Before Christmas.

After Gilbert finally got his homework in on time,
he received a smiley face sticker on his paper
as a reward for his good work.

*******************************************

To introduce the concept of what a
MAIN CHARACTER is to
Baby Girl and Little Wild Man
(and give Jungle Girl a brief review),
I gave the kiddos the same
"homework assignment."

Each of the kiddos drew one or two of their
favorite MAIN CHARACTERS...

***************************************************

Here are their final results:

Jungle Girl drew...

...Felicity from the
Felicity book series by American Girl.

Baby Girl chose...

...Fancy Nancy from
Fancy Nancy...

...and Curious George
from the Merry Christmas Curious George.

Little Wild Man
rounded out our brood with his version of...

...Little Llama
from
Llama Llama Holiday Drama.

***************************************************

As a reward for their good work,
each of the kiddos recieved...
...a pack of holiday stickers...
...which they promptly displayed...
...on their papers.

Snowman Spelling

I find as my kiddos get older,
making their assignments hands-on can at times
be a challenge.

I also notice that my eldest child (who's a 2nd grader) feels a tad left out
when I'm working with her younger siblings
on their different preschool/Kindergarten type activities.

So, since we have been using snow as our theme,
I found a way to make Jungle Girl's spelling practice
a bit more "fun" this past week.

Normally, Jungle Girl practices her spelling words like this:

Monday: Copy spelling words onto index cards
Tuesday: Practices some type of Language Arts skill with the words
Wednesday: Go over words and has a pretest
Thursday: Copies any words she missed on the pretest 10 each
Friday: Final test on missed words

(No spelling on Thursday and Friday if no words are missed on Wednesday)

When I found the cutest snowman file folder game here on File Folder Fun,
I knew I could use the snowman template to spice up Jungle Girl's spelling this week.
On Monday, I had her copy her spelling words
onto the top half of the snowmen.

Her language arts activity on Tuesday involved
adding suffixes to her spelling words.

I wrote the suffixes on the bottom halves of the snowmen and she moved
each spelling word snowman from ending to ending.

When she formed a word, she would write it down on her notebook paper.

(Please note that the first two words on her paper
are incorrect- we discussed that later...)

I must say, this was a great way to
"wildly" work
on spelling skills!

Detailed Dice

This one time, at band camp...

(OK, this is NOT a post about movie quotes, I promise!)

Today, my 2nd grader worked with a pretty fun product in the HOPES to make writing fun...

Story Starter Cubes

I have had these cubes a little while and used them to strengthen creative writing skills when I workd in the classroom. Since Jungle Girl has been learning about adding details to her writing, I thought I could utilize these dice in today's lessons.

She began the exercise by rolling three different dice to make a simple sentence.

She then added details to the sentence on her own notebook paper.

******************************************************
Oh, and an update on a new addition to our family...

Meet Princess, a Brown Anole Lizard.
(Jungle Girl used her Christmas money to buy her.)

She's digesting her supper...

We love ALL creatures, small and slimy, in this household...