It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

...in my classroom anyway! 

Oh how I wish we had a white Christmas in Australia.

We have been SUPER busy at school list term. With swimming, reports, school athletics carnival and testing, it has been full on! As of last week Christmas officially hit my classroom, and I absolutely love it! We've been doing Christmas writing, Christmas maths, Christmas art, Christmas cooking and Christmas reading. 

I've got heaps to show you, so I'm linking up with Kacey at Doodle Bugs for Five for Friday. Enjoy!

At the start of the week we received a super special delivery all the way from the North Pole! 20 eager faces watched as we unwrapped our parcel and found that it was our elf on the shelf! Needless to say my little wonders we all very excited! Inside the parcel we found our elf, a letter from Santa, a DVD and a candy cane for everyone. He spent the day watching us from his box, making sure everyone was working hard. This year he has been named Mr. Bauble (let's be thankful it wasn't Trevor or Simon as some of them suggested).

The next day we found him on top of our smart board, looking very cheeky indeed!

This has to be one of my ABSOLUTE favourite Christmas keepsakes I've made with any class, and will be one I do every year from now on. The little wonders coloured in and cut out five characters from the Christmas story (courtesy of Kari Bolt). They laminated them and put them onto a clear mobile that I purchased from Zart Art (an art supply company in Australia). I cannot say how happy I am with how they turned out.

I received a beautiful message from the mother of one of my kids, saying how special it was.

How flippin' cute are these guys!! 

These are our 'Snowmen Catching Snowflakes'. My little ones cut out all the parts of the snowman, including his arms, nose and scarf. They then stuck some gorgeous snowflake sequins above his head and drew on a perfect dotted mouth. We did catching snowflake self portraits last year with oil pastel, and I think this is a great version of it. 

There were a few different versions of this art work that I found on Pinterest, but my main inspiration came from We Heart Art.

Can you believe we ran out of snowflakes on the last one! One of my little wonders had to use silver stars instead, he didn't mind :)

One of our writing activities this week was to imagine Santa was stuck in our chimney. I played the song for them on YouTube and then we brainstormed ways we could get him out. 

I found a pin for this writing activity about 2 years ago. I found the brick pattern and Santa's boots on google images and made up the writing temple myself. 

Click here for the free template. 

I use to hate glitter! I would absolutely dread getting it out. Now I don't know what's changed but  I seem to be more and more game to get the glitter out. My little wonders used guided drawing to create these super cute reindeer. They painted them with brown paint and used stippling to create texture in their fur. After they dried they outlined them with black markers, added cheeks, eyes, a mouth and a nose, and put red or gold glitter on their nose depending on wether they had a red or brown nose. As you can see, red was a much more popular choice. 

Mind you we did realise afterward that we'd forgotten the ears! Oh well. 

I hope you've enjoyed my Christmas themed Five for Friday! 

Happy Blogging.