Christmas in the Classroom - Christmas Tree Button Ornaments

I am always thankful that I teach in a private school. But I am especially grateful around Christmas. I get to teach about the birth of our Savior. This is such a wonderful time in our classroom, and every day we spend time talking about the birth of Jesus. 

Last week we made ornaments for our school Christmas tree. Every classroom comes up with an ornament and each child makes one. Last year I made poinsettias out of toilet paper rolls and tissue paper. This year I wanted to try something different. 

We made Christmas trees out of green and brown buttons! It was a lot of fun, but also took more time than I thought. Overall, they turned out great! They were even asking to make extras throughout the day. 

Directions: 

We used four brown buttons for the trunk. These need to be the same size.

We used 10 green buttons to make our tree. (This will depend on how big you want your tree to be.)

Line up the green buttons so they are in the shape of a Christmas tree. 

Take the cord and thread it through a brown button. Slide it down to the center of the cord. Take the opposite side of the cord and thread it through the second hole, diagonal from the hole you first used. This should make a big "U" shape with both ends of the cord sticking up. Then thread on three more brown buttons on top of each other so they sit right on top of each other. Then thread the largest green button and continue the same process until you used up your green buttons. 

Once you have stacked your buttons and your ornament looks like a Christmas tree, slide on a plastic star bead. Then, tie the two cords together into a knot.

Tie another knot about 3-4 inches above your first knot to finish your ornament!

How do you celebrate Christmas in the classroom?

Note: I did not come up with the idea for the Christmas Tree Button Ornaments. However, the picture and products are mine.

Clouds

Written in November, posted in December.

Clouds...
Have you ever spent the afternoon looking at the clouds in the sky? I love being able lay on the ground with my fourth graders and point out different shapes and sizes of clouds, and then classifying them! 

"Wait, WHAT?! We aren't just spending time outside for fun?!?" 

Oh, dear children, we do not have enough time for that! After drawing the different clouds we saw, we needed to figure out if they were cirrus clouds, cumulus clouds, or stratus clouds. Since this was the first day of the unit, I didn't get into the other types of clouds (cumulonimbus, etc). I made some cutout clouds classify the altitudes of clouds.

We also made a little flip book to write down our own definitions of each type of cloud.

We started this unit on the same day I teach Art. We decided to make some clouds out of glue and shaving cream. This was so much fun! I was a little weary about doing it (because I didn't do a practice run), but it was fun for the kids and me! As you can see I bought Brut shaving cream. I had my choice of many different kinds, but this one reminded me of my dad. All day long people were coming into our classroom commenting on the scent of old man :)

I love teaching this unit as much as they love messing around! It's so much better when you can keep the textbooks in the desks and learn about the world around you!

Of course we couldn't help ourselves and we put shaving cream on our desks and wrote out our spelling words, pictures, etc. Unfortunately there aren't any pictures because my hands were a little messy :) 

Note: I did not come up with the idea for any of these activities or drawings. However, the picture and products are mine.