Our Christmas Party

Happy first day of Christmas break to me!

Yesterday was our party and it went off without a hitch! I am forever grateful to the teacher I worked with in the spring of 2010 who always organized her parties in stations. My typically energetic and loud kids are very well-behaved during our classroom parties because they are in small groups being supervised by a parent doing a fun activity. Hooray for stations!!

Here's what we did at our party.

Our first station was math bingo! My cousin, Kelley, is doing some of her observation hours in my class, and I was lucky enough to have her for the party! Her bingo cards were super cute. The kids rolled dice and added the numbers together, then covered up the answer.

Another station was making candy cane ornaments out of beads and pipe cleaners! This one was brought in by one of my room moms. She couldn't come to the party, so she sent her high school daughter instead. The word on the street was that she did NOT want to be at the party, but she hid it well and worked great with the kiddos!!

We also played Christmas Cover-Up, thanks to First Grade Garden. This was actually pretty similar to the Christmas bingo game, but none of the kids seemed to notice... They would roll the foam dice and add up the numbers, then cover up their answers. Apparently no one won this game in any of the rotations. Oh wells!

And our last station was two-in-one. First, we made magic reindeer food out of oatmeal and glitter. I used the tags found here. The reindeer clip art is a little weird-looking, but we don't have a color printer at school and I didn't want to use a ton of ink. Because this took a total of 2 seconds to scoop out some reindeer food, I also gave them something fun - a Christmas crypto-code puzzle from Super Teacher Worksheets. They love decoding these things, and it was a little brain break during the party.

After the stations were finished, it was food and present time!

I wanted to have a breakfast party, since we only had a half day. So we had a fruit tray, mini bagels with cream cheese, and apple and orange juice. So delicious and pretty nutricious! And, this is really shocking, NO ONE brought cupcakes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I was so happy, especially after the four sets of cupcakes at Halloween.

Here's a closeup of the beautiful fruit tray. Sadly, by the time I got to it, the strawberries were long gone. :(

And then we handed out gifts. These were the gift bags I gave my kids. Inside was a Scholastic book that I picked out for each kid specifically and a Smencil, which they LOVED! The bags say "Jesus loves you snow much." Oriental Trading sent these bags to my mom's work as a Christmas gift or something, but she works at a speech/occupational therapy center, so they couldn't really use them. So I really lucked into these bags! And they held all of the kids' stuff pretty well.

A few kids brought in goody bags for the other kids. They had candy or little toys or games inside. It was really sweet! But kind of a crazy mess. They loved it though. And look! Someone got Pete the Cat for Christmas!! :)

I got some sweet gifts too! I got a Thirty-One Organizing Utility Tote that looks just like this! Mine is downstairs so I borrowed this picture from Mommy of Two Little Monkeys. Mine says "A+ Teacher" in pink!!

I also got a super cute snowman treat dish! I am in love with this thing because I have none of my own Christmas decorations. When I move out someday, I am going to have the saddest house at Christmas time. Now it will be a little more jolly!!!!

I am very thankful this Christmas for having a job, teaching twelve little people that make me laugh every day, and having awesome room moms and the best future-teacher-cousin ever to make my Christmas party a smashing success!!!