Five For Friday - Thanksgiving Style

Hey Bloggers! Another first for me this week! I'm hooking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for their weekly Five For Friday. Usually, you post 5 things your kiddos in your classroom did that week to share ideas with other teachers. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I'll share a few things we did and a few things I'm thankful for! 

On Tuesday, we had Grandparents Day. All of the kids brought their Grandparents to school, there was a little singing performance, cookies and milk and then the kids showed their grandparents all around the school. We teachers had to spend a ton of time preparing for Grandparents day, thinking of different creative activities for the kids to do so we could hang it up in the hallway.

We used some of the activities from this awesome (and FREE!) Grandparents Day packet made by Jessica Travis over at Wild About Firsties. 

I wish I had taken pictures of my kids work. Some of their answers were so funny! So pros about the Favorite Things: I love that it got the kiddos thinking about what their grandparents like. Some of their answers were spot on! Like they would say their grandparents favorite show was Jeopardy because they were always watching it when they went over. However, some of mine were a little unsettled by the fact that they didn't know what their grandparent favorite things were. So they made it up. Then we had that someone's grandpa's favorite movie was "Thor". So funny! 

I stumbled upon the most massive Black Friday Blog Hop going on today! So many teacher-blogs have offered some awesome freebies for Black Friday. They are calling it Summer in December Hop! Everything is December/Christmas or Summer themed or both! So fun to see Santa in a Hawaiian shirt! 

 

Just look at all of those goodies! :)

 

On Friday my kiddos listened to this book as a read aloud and watched the movie with their substitute. It's about a little girl named Molly who's family moves from Russia (?) for religious freedom and the kids tease her because of her accent. As a school project she has to make a pilgrim doll, she makes one that is Russian-Jewish to be just like her because in her opinion, she too is a pilgrim. I thought this would be so cool to show the kids how anyone can be a pilgrim and that even today some people immigrate so that they might have religious freedom. I hope that this inspired them to be thankful and proud that everyday we can wake up and choose how we want to worship and what a privilege it is that we can be proud of this! They even made a Venn Diagram to compare and contrast Molly with the original pilgrims.

So, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I am thankful that because Jesus was sent to die on the cross, I can have a relationship with God and because of the pilgrims, I have the freedom choose to worship God every day, every hour, every five minutes. In addition, I am thankful that God has blessed me with a small group filled with 20 somethings. Holla! Meeting people and having community has been a struggle since moving back home and I praise God that He provided me with an awesome community filled with Jesus loving people my own age. 

It's Christmas time! What, what! I am getting into the Christmas spirit today! We went and got our tree today and we put it up ourselves. 

For anyone a little confused, the girl in the bottom right corner is my twin sister. The picture in the left bottom corner is of me!

Then we spent the rest of the evening decorating the whole house and listening to Christmas music. And tonight will be spent curled up with hot chocolate and watching Hallmark and Lifetime Christmas movies. So, I'm thankful for Christmas time, the Holiday spirit of merriness and thankfulness, for family together time, for only 3 weeks until Christmas break, for making it halfway through my first year of teaching, for all 20 of my new first grade friends, for awesome coworkers, and for fun Christmas music!