Teacher Freebies for December

Welcome to my monthly round up of teacher freebies for December!  On the first day of every month (or around - lol), I'll feature a few of the best teacher freebies that I have found from around the internet.  

I have organized them by grade level, but you might want to check the other grades for overlap or if you need to differentiate for your students!

This post contains affiliate links. I earn a small commission each time someone makes a purchase using one of my links, which helps to support the blog.  All opinions are my own and I only promote brands and products that I have used myself and truly love.

Teacher freebies for December (Pre-K - K)

Christmas Color By Number 

Your little ones will love practicing letters, sight words and numbers with this freebie from The Homeschool Style - Katie Ring.

Christmas Coloring Pages

Here is another Christmas Coloring Pages Freebie for your younger learners! This one is from Angie S.

Christmas (December) Math and Literacy Centers

This December Preschool centers freebie contains two full centers including the Santa roll and cover pictured above, and an abc search activity.  You will love these centers from Kindergarten Rocks!

Teacher freebies for December (1st grade - 2nd grade)

December Reading Bingo

This December Reading Bingo is a great way to motivate your students to read all month long.  This freebie is from A Teacher and Her Cat.

Christmas Color By Number Addition Facts Freebie

Your students will love practicing their addition facts with this fun Christmas Color by Number Freebie!  

It is a sample of my Christmas Color by Number Addition Set.  

December Writing Prompts

Your students will have so much fun with these December writing prompts from The Kinder Kids.

Teacher freebies for December (3rd grade - 4th grade)

Christmas Color By Number Multiplication Freebie

Your students will love practicing their multiplication facts with this Christmas Color by Number Multiplication Freebie!  

It is a sample of my Christmas Color by Number Multiplication set.   

If I Were in a Snow Globe Writing Prompt and Graphic Organizers

Your students will have so much writing about the time that were trapped inside a snow globe!  This freebie gives graphic organizers to help them plan and organize their writing.

Christmas Would You Rather Journal Writing Prompts

My students always love Would Your Rather Questions!  Your students will love this Christmas themed resource from Keep 'em Thinking With Susan Morrow.

Teacher freebies for December (5th grade - 6th grade)

Christmas Figurative Language Identification Freebie

Your students can practice identifying figurative language with this Christmas freebie from Teaching to the Middle.

A Cowboy's Letter to Santa Reading Comprehension Freebie

This freebie will give your students an opportunity to read and answer questions about the poem, "A Cowboy's Letter to Santa".  It's from Teaching to the Middle.

Spin and Solve Worksheets

These spin and solve worksheets are a fun way for your students to get in some math practice!  This freebie is from Hearts in Bloom.

Helpful Tools We Love For Printable Activities

* Printer I absolutely LOVE my HP Printer that uses Instant Ink! I love it because I can use as much ink as I want for one low cost!  No more running to the store for printer cartridges! Try it out for free here!

Looking for More Teacher Freebies?

You can find more freebies in these blog posts:

January Freebies for Teachers

November Freebies for Teachers

October Freebies for Teachers

I also have more freebies available at my Teachers pay Teachers store here.

Before you go, don't forget to enter our current giveaways!

Descriptive Writing Mini-Lesson - Gary Hogg Author Visit

Do you wish your students wrote more descriptively?  Is their writing rather ho-hum and boring?  You might want to try this descriptive writing mini- lesson based on a recent Gary Hogg author visit.  You will be amazed at how descriptive their writing will be!

This post contains affiliate links. I earn a small commission each time someone makes a purchase using one of my links, which helps to support the blog.  All opinions are my own and I only promote brands and products that I have used myself and truly love.  

Our school was lucky enough to have an author visit from Gary Hogg.  In addition to his whole school assemblies, he also provided writer's workshops for some of our students.  You can get a brief taste of what he shared in this video below:

During the assembly, he mentioned to the students that they needed to use their author's voice.  I was so impressed with my students' author voices after this quick mini-lesson with Gary.

Gary told the students that authors think twice.  He further explained, sometimes authors use a word that is really a category, but it is not really descriptive.  Examples he gave for categories were ice-cream, dogs, and colors.  He told the students that authors looked back at their writing for categories and made them details instead.  Examples of details might be: mint chocolate ice cream, a feisty puppy, or sea foam green.

He had the students practice turning categories into details.  You can see a video of this below where he asks the students to give details about dogs.

Since his visit, I have been using this idea as a warm-up from time to time during writer's workshop to get the students really thinking about details.

After this little warm-up he told them that he was going to have them write for 5 minutes.  He had them close their eyes and think of a memory.  He reminded them to think in details rather than categories.  He played a really funky machine that made music as the students thought.  Then he had them put pencil to paper.

You can watch a video of a similar lesson here:

My students were amazed at how much they wrote in only 5 minutes (to be honest, so was I)!

When the 5 minutes were up, he had them draw a line underneath the writing that they had so far.  Then he told them that writers:

Write

Revise

Repeat

He asked them to go back into their writing to find places where they had categories and change them to details.  He told them to write "smart bubbles" below their writing with arrows pointing to where they wanted to add it to the writing.  

To get them really thinking, he asked questions such as:

What day?

Was it morning/afternoon/night?

What was the weather like?

What is your mom's name?

What words could you use to describe your mom.

Where were you at?

Here is an example of a student's writing after answering these questions.

My students were so engaged in revising!  How does this even happen?

Samples of my students' writing:

If you want to find more about Gary Hogg, check out his website and his YouTube page!

If you try this lesson in your classroom, I would love to see pictures!  

Please email me at kellys3ps@sbcglobal.net or tag me on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter!

And... before you go, make sure to visit my Giveaways page to enter our weekly giveaway to win a $25 Teachers pay Teachers gift card!

 I would love to hear from you! ❤️

Have a question? Idea for a resource you might find helpful?

Be so kind and leave a comment below.

No Excuses List

Do you have students who consistently make the same writing errors?  

This post contains affiliate links. I earn a small commission each time someone makes a purchase using one of my links, which helps to support the blog.  All opinions are my own and I only promote brands and products that I have used myself and truly love. 

• Do they forget to capitalize the beginning of their sentences?
• Do they forget to capitalize proper nouns?
• Do they leave out ending punctuation?
• Do they misspell common words such as who, because, too, there, etc?
• Do they forget to indent paragraphs?

Many of these skills are skills they have been working on since early elementary, yet the mistakes keep happening?  Why?  Because we allow them to keep doing it!

This is how I have gotten the errors to (mostly) stop.  Enter the No Excuses List:

I post the anchor chart above on the wall and give my students a similar version to keep in their binders.

I teach a mini-lesson about our No-Excuses list.  I remind them that the items on this list are all things that they have learned in prior grades, so they are no excuses for them not showing these skills in their writing.  

I explain that when I see these types of errors in their assignment, I will draw a red star at the top of the paper to let them know that they need to go back and proofread their paper using the no excuses list.

At the beginning of the year I draw A LOT of red stars on their papers, but by the end of the year I hardly draw any at all!

If you would like to grab an editable version of the student no excuses list you can get it FREE at my Teachers pay Teachers store here.

If you do decide to use this No Excuses List, I would love to see pictures!  Please email me at kellys3ps@sbcglobal.net or tag me on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter!



And... before you go, make sure to visit my Giveaways page to enter our weekly giveaway to win a $25 Teachers pay Teachers gift card!

Take a Photo Walk With Your Students To Fire Up Their Writing

Have you ever been on an Apple Photo Walk? It's a free class offered at Apple stores where an Apple employee guides you through a scenic walk while providing tips and tricks for getting the best photos from your iPhone.

This post contains affiliate links. I earn a small commission each time someone makes a purchase using one of my links, which helps to support the blog.  All opinions are my own and I only promote brands and products that I have used myself and truly love.  

My sons, Luke and Cody are super into photography and making videos, so they wanted to take the class.  As I took the class along with them - I realized a ton of possibilities for using this in the classroom! Here are a few of my ideas for using this practice for writing.

The Apple Creative met us in the store and gave us a quick run-down of how the photo walk would go.  

She really emphasized telling a story with your pictures.  This got me thinking of how this technique could be used to help your students write a story.

I decided my story for my photos would be this blog post with pictures of my boys telling their own stories.  

The boys had a harder time focusing on their own story as they were taking the pictures, but when they went back and looked through them, they were able to group pictures into themes and had several story ideas.

One of the suggestions she gave us was to find things that looked out of place - like these purple flowers with a burst of random orange color.

Another suggestion was to take pictures at different angles.  Cody was able to take a picture of this rock and make it look like a mountain!

I LOVE his dedication to this shot!  The boys were 100% engaged the whole hour and I know students will be as well when I try this out with my class!

The Photo Walk ended with an editing and share session inside the store.  The boys were able to talk about each picture with story ideas - this verbal story telling is great practice for students before they begin writing as well!

I will share how this activity goes with my class in a later post (as well as a few other ideas that were sparked during our Photo Walk for other subjects)! 

You can sign up for your own Photo Walk here.

They also have Teacher Tuesday classes with several different topics you can sign up for.