'Tis the season to celebrate and spread holiday cheer! With the festivities just around the corner, I know how busy teachers like you can be. That's why I’m here to lend a helping hand with an essential resource: a carefully crafted Christmas Party Parent Letter designed exclusively for you.
I understand the importance of effective communication with parents, especially when it comes to special events like the Christmas party.
This user-friendly and customizable holiday party letter toparents will help you provide clear and concise information to parents, ensuring that your Christmas party is a huge success.
The holidays are a time for joy, celebration, and creating lasting memories. This letter gives you everything you need to make your Christmas party truly magical.
Don't miss out on this fantastic resource! Download the editableletter now and get ready to kick-start the holiday spirit with your students and their families.
Wishing you a joyful and stress-free holiday season filled withwonderful moments and happy memories!
Looking for a fun and festive way to keep your students engaged during the holiday season? Christmas math color-by-number activities are the perfect solution! These worksheets combine the excitement of holiday-themed coloring with the challenge of solving math problems.
Whether you're teaching addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division, Christmas math color-by-number sheets offer a creative way to reinforce math skills while spreading holiday cheer. They're great for classroom use, homework assignments, or even as a fun activity for kids to do at home during winter break.
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.
As a teacher, I understand how difficult it can be to keep students focused during the holiday season, so why not incorporate their enthusiasm into their learning? These color-by-number worksheets are not only fun but also a great way for your students to practice addition and multiplication skills while enjoying the festive spirit of Christmas.
With these color-by-number
sheets, your students will be able to solve addition or multiplication problems and create
beautiful Christmas-themed pictures featuring Santa, reindeer, candy canes, and
more! It's a win-win situation where they can have a blast coloring and
learning at the same time. And the best part? These worksheets require no
preparation, making them an easy and stress-free addition to your lesson plans.
I currently have both addition and multiplication versions of these Christmas Color by Number Printables as well as a number words version. If you have a request for additional skills, leave a comment below!
If you scroll down, you will see newer versions I have created as suggested by readers like you!
To ensure
that your students receive immediate feedback and you can assess their
understanding, each color-by-code activity sheet comes with an answer key. This
way, you can easily track their progress and provide constructive feedback
where needed. Moreover, the answer keys also allow students to self-check their
work, reinforcing their learning in a meaningful way.
But that's not all! You'll find diverse versions of
characters such as Christmas Elf, Santa Claus, and Mrs. Claus. This means you can cater to the unique needs of all your students, ensuring an inclusive and engaging learning experience for everyone.
And here's some exciting news: These Christmas color-by-code pages are also available in
my money-saving color-by-number bundles, which include worksheets for various
holidays. By purchasing these bundles, you can save over 50% on all sets!
It's a fantastic opportunity to provide your students with a plethora of fun and educational activities throughout the year while staying within your
budget.
If you are anything like most teachers, your students come to you NOT knowing their math facts. When students don't have fluency with their math facts, it makes teaching higher level mathematical concepts even more difficult! I have put together some of my favorite ways to have students practice math facts. The best part? Students LOVE them too!
Math Fact Relay Race
Math Facts made fun! Students practice their math facts with this fun relay game. Could be easily adapted to other skills as well!
Directions:
1. Cut out 2 circle with a circle cut out inside of it (like a doughnut shape).
2. Write factors around the circle.
3. Put one factor in the middle of the circle.
4. Have students race to multiply the factor in the middle with one of the factors on the ring. (Could also be used for addition, subtraction, division, and vocabulary words)
Color By Number
My students beg to let them color during the school day - and while I am happy to give them a brain break from time to time, I feel much better about letting them color when they are also practicing their math facts!
I am currently working on a growing bundle of math facts color by number sets for both multiplication and addition (you can also buy each set separately at my TpT store). You can get a great deal by buying the set now, because the price goes up as I add each set, but you can get them all for today's price!
Math Facts Game Capture My students absolutely LOVE this game for practicing their math facts! You can watch the video below to see how we use it for practicing multiplication, but it can be easily adapted for other skills as well (including sight word or vocabulary words)! You can find the complete directions for the Capture Math Facts Game here.
Math Facts Erase
Write math fact problems on the board. One student calls out the answer to one of the problems, and the other erases the problem that matches their answer. If the student erasing the problems is stumped, they switch places.
What's better than Rock, Paper, Scissors, Rock, Paper, Scissors, Math of course! Students hold up zero to ten fingers each. They find the product of the two numbers they are showing. The first person to respond wins the round.
Kaboom Math Facts Game
Kaboom Type Games are a fun way to practice math facts. Place a set of math facts in a container along with several cards that say Kaboom. You can hand write the facts on index cards or buy a set such as my Cookies for Santa Kaboom game or my Water Fight Game.
Students take turn pulling the cards from the container and answering the math facts on them. If they get the answer correct, they get to keep their card. If they answer incorrectly, they put the card back in. If a student pulls the dreaded Kaboom card out, they have to put back all of their cards. The winner is the student with the most cards at the end of the game.
Math Facts Flyswatter
Write some products on index cards. Give students each a flyswatter. Call out a math fact such as 7 X 8. Students will race to swat the correct answer, 56.
Math Facts Who Am I
Write various products on index cards and paper clip them to your students' backs so they can't see them. The other student gives them a math fact that would have the answer of the number on the back so the student can guess their number. This is easily differentiated by your students' ability as you can see in the video.
Halloween is often the first party of the school year, and after a busy back to school season, it can be challenging to plan out! I thought I would share a few of my favorite Halloween read alouds, activities, and some tips and tricks that I have used to make this crazy day a little less taxing!
This post also contains affiliate links and I will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on my links.
Halloween Party
Choose Your Snacks And Drinks
Many schools have health and wellness policies that spell out the types of snacks and drinks that you can serve. Often schools require that treats be store-bought or pre-packaged as well. Make sure you check these requirements before requesting items from parents.
Invites
I like to send a note home to my parents a week or two before Halloween to let them know how we will be celebrating. You can grab this Halloween Party letter to parents freebie by clicking here. Make sure to ask for parent volunteers as well. Determine how many activities you will have, and request a parent volunteer for each activity. You might also want to include a volunteer (or two) that focus on delivering and cleaning up food items.
Music Maestro
What's a party without music? I love using Kidz Bop in the classroom because I don't have to worry about inappropriate lyrics playing when I least expect it. Halloween is crazy enough without having to deal with parent calls after school!
Print out this fun Halloween Word Search puzzle and get your students ready for everyone's favorite spooky holiday!
Math
Halloween Color By Number Math Facts Practice Color-by-number activities are ALWAYS a hit in my classroom, and Halloween is no exception! I love being able to get a little math fact practice in with my students with these color-by-code sheets.
FREEBIES - Download the previews of these resources for a free color-by-number worksheet!
Ghost Math Facts Craftivity
And in keeping with the math fact theme, another great activity that can be used to celebrate Halloween in the classroom are these adorable math fact ghosts!
You can make another great Halloween-themed math game with these spooky eyeballs from Dollar Tree. (If you can't find them, Amazon has a set of these eyeballs as well). Simply write numbers onto the eyeballs using a sharpie. You can practice skills such as:
math facts
double digit multiplication, subtraction, or addition
long division
rounding
While you are at Dollar Tree, grab a bag of candy corn to practice comparing numbers.
Reading
Halloween Read Alouds
One of the best things about Halloween is that there are so many great read-alouds centered around it. I buy most of my Halloween-themed books from Amazon - being a Prime member makes it so much easier since they arrive quickly even when I buy one at the last moment. I have also purchased from Scholastic and Barnes and Noble (which always has great holiday displays in their children's section). I shared a list of my favorite Halloween read-alouds in this blog post.
My students LOVE Halloween and I LOVE reading aloud to them, so here are a few of my favorite Halloween read alouds that are perfect for upper elementary 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.
This is a Halloween/Thanksgiving twist on the classic fairy tale The Ugly Duckling. The Ugly Pumpkin waits all season long for someone to take him home for Halloween, but no one will. He doesn't look like the other pumpkins, so he sets off in search for a place where he will fit in. Sure enough, he finds exactly where he belongs - BUT, it's not at all what he expected!
Teaching Ideas:
Themes: Loving yourself, fitting in
Grammar:
Adjectives - this book is filled with great adjectives for your students to find including: ugly, bright, crispy, late, cruel, overrun, odd, and happy.
Adverbs - your students can find a plethora of adverbs including: plainly, early, when, alone, awhile, then, and finally.
Verbs - See if you can challenge your students to write some sentences using the verbs in the story: waiting, picked, looking, getting, tricked, laughed, rolled, and happened.
Writing: This book is an adaptation of a fairy tale, see if your students can write their own adaptation of The Ugly Ducking or the fairy tale of their choice.
Tim carves a pumpkin that is fierce and funny. A pumpkin like that deserves a name, and so he gives him one - Jack. Tim loves Jack so much that he keeps him "Long after the best trick-or-treat candy was eaten". He keeps Jack until it begins to rot and Mom tells Tim to throw it out. He takes it into the garden instead, and that is where the magic begins! He watches it throughout the year as it undergoes many changes until becoming his Jack'O'Lantern again.
This fun little tale is a Halloween adaptation of the classic Stone Soup. Finnigin is infamous for his ravenous appetite. Every where he goes he carries his eating stool, his eating spoon, and of course his gigantic eating mouth. When he happens upon a new town, all of the creatures there have been warned about his ravenous hunger, and they lock up all of their food. Finnigin stirs up some delicious Bone Soup and tricks them all into sharing with him.
Teaching Ideas:
Themes: sharing
Vocabulary: There are so many great vocabulary words in this book including: wits, ravenous, barren, impending, plague, locusts, panic, spare, cauldron, ceremoniously, splintered, ghoul, delicacy, stammered, fetched, stash, wistful, and longingly.
Punctuation: Many of the sentences include commas and quotation marks. You might give students samples of these sentences without the punctuation and ask them to correct them. You could also ask them to find the sentences and generate some punctuation rules for them.
This book of poems is filled with monster size problems! Frankenstein's cupboards are bare. The Creature from the Black Lagoon doesn't wait an hour before swimming and goes into the bog too soon. The Phantom of the Opera has a song stuck in his head. The witches have watchers. And, don't even get started on Dracula's hygiene issues!
If your students are fans of Shel Silverstein poetry, they will love these ones!
Teaching Ideas:
Writing: Have your students write their own Halloween poems.
Figurative Language - Can your students find the figurative language throuout the book?
The rhyming text of this book makes it so fun to read! At the old haunted house there are all kinds of creatures: a big ma monster and her wee monsters two, a scrawny black cat and her wee kittens three, a green pa goblin and his wee goblins four, and even more! Writing: Have you Teaching Ideas:
Writing: This would make such a great mentor text for writing all sorts of things. Have your students use the same model to write a story book, or to teach about a non-fiction topic.
What are your favorite Halloween Books to Read Aloud? Share with us in the comments!
