Germany, Gingerbread and Funny Food Faces

Every Christmas season, I do a social studies mini-unit about Christmas traditions around the world. One of the countries we learn about is Germany and we also learn about the tradition of gingerbread!!!!!

We do a fun gingerbread man glyph in math class that was photocopied and given to me three years ago from my friend Jessica. This year, I found a fun website that lets students decorate a gingerbread house! Its called "Gingerbread House Dress Up Game" and its on Highlights for Kids! website. My students really enjoyed the house making and we even did it again today. We made a total of three houses. The first one they made, and each one after they insisted that we write with icing "We love God". It really warmed my heart this holiday season.

Even more fun, I discovered on this same website another big hit with the kids called 'Funny Food Face". We played it a total of 13 times as each one of my students was able to choose the food they wanted to use to make their face's eyes, nose, mouth and hair. (A tip if you use this in your class though: turn off the sound!) It was silly of course, but it reinforced the vocabulary for food (many of them didn't know bacon, olive or mushroom for example) and it also solidified direction words like up, down, left, right, smaller, bigger, rotate and flip.

If you have a Smart Board the kids could do it themselves, but the first time through I just had them point and ask for the food they wanted and then orally direct me to where they wanted it placed. I was using it as an oral English activity but you could have the kids come use the computer mouse and do it themselves as well. Another teacher's two kids did the activity that way during lunch. They're in 3rd and 2nd grade and they had just as much if not more fun than the first graders did!

Happy Holidays and enjoy the fun things to do with your students using a projector or Smart Board or even a class set of laptops. :)

http://www.highlightskids.com/Magazine/Feb05/h10205funnyFood.asp

Well, it's been a long time since I blogged anything having to do with my students. But I have a good reason why: I rescued a terrier puppy named Sydney in October and now all of my free time basically is all about the dog. :) Which I don't mind.

Having a class of 13 really helps have a built in socialisation pool to draw from. It's interesting to see how the puppy responds to the kids and the kids to Sydney. Sometimes I bring her up to school and sometimes the kids come over to my house (which is just across the street from school)

Grace and Jack came one day and they played with her for a little over an hour! Grace was great with the dog. Tracy bought the dog some toys for Christmas and so I brought her up yesterday to let the kids play with her again. I'm also watching the 4th grade bus students in addition to my own bus kids this week, so the 4th graders had a ball with her! They were like "Miss L, she sort of looks like Andromeda!" (their teachers dog) and couldn't believe it when I said 'Yes, they are sisters! They're from the same litter!

It's been really fun to teach her different commands and I'm a sucker, she sleeps with me at night. I have a Nintendo DS and I was waiting for Josie and Amelia to make enough money on Nintendogs for me to have my own lab -- yeah, not anymore! Sydney is way better than any video game!

Anyway, I think Sydney has been a great lesson for the students on how to treat animals kindly and with respect. And its been great for Sydney to learn how to act around children and other people. She's got the whole 'sit' thing down when people come in the house or if we're out walking but she's still working on it when in the classroom!! She just gets a little too excited and so do the kids! Many of them have never had exposure to dogs or the prior knowledge of what a mammal is, so this sets them up for when we get to that science unit as well.

Do you use animals in the classroom?