Christmas in third grade

Here are some things from the last few days of class.    We spent a lot of time working on the Christmas Program, various kids were in and out at different times, kids with solos, kids with speaking parts, select choir, etc.  So there was time for some other fun things. 

We wrote Christmas cards for soldiers.  My neighbor's son is stationed somewhere warm and sandy and requested Christmas cookies.  My neighbor took care of the cookies, my third graders took care of the cards.

The 24 of us collected 27 Operation Christmas boxes.  The whole school collected like 670 ish.  That's a lot of little ones with special boxes of goodies over the next few months.  Several members of our staff were privileged enough to be part of the passing out of boxes last summer in Uganda.  

 
Our Christmas party was tons of fun.  The kids iced ice-cream cones and decorated as Christmas trees.

 
For the snack, they had an ice-cream bar.

The parent presents turned out great.  I went to Menards and had them cut some pieces of 5.25 wide wood into roughly 5 inch tall pieces.

 
The kids sanded them down.

They painted the fronts white, added a vinyl sticker I cut out on my silhouette, then painted the whole thing grey.  The white and grey paint both needed two coats.  It literally took all week. The kids didn't know, but I gave the second coats afterschool when they were gone.

The kids peeled off the stickers and I snuck them home for some touchups. 

I don't know if they noticed or not.   I sure did.  The vinyl shaped was a 'weld' of three that I purchased through the silhouette online store.  I think I have about $23 dollars in this project and we made 26 blocks.  We could have gotten another 6 or so more out of the supplies left.  I could have saved money by using paint on hand and scrap wood from the garage, but didn't.

These did get painted on the backs too, this is mid-process.  We gave them a quick clear coat and wrapped them up for their mama's and daddies.

I had wanted them to write a bible verse on the back or something but they looked so good, I didn't want to mess them up at all.

They were adapted from last year's Christmas project.

 

Upon writing this, I have one more last morning of Christmas break.  I might be missing my littles a bit, but am pretty much loving sleeping until 7:30.  That's 2 extra hours.  I think everybody needs 2 extra hours of sleep a few days a week.