A Gift Of Learning

Are you looking for some quick and easy projects for your students to make that can be a bulletin board or hallway decoration, yet are still teaching report card standards?

You’ve come to the right place! These craftivities also provide great fine motor skill practice too.

A wonderful keepsake art project, that makes a great puppet manipulative, so that you can whole group assess spatial directions, and body part identification is the reindeer lunch bag puppet.

It’s terrific for interactive play during a reading of many December stories featuring reindeer characters too.

Afterwards, line students up, have them slip on their puppets and count them.

You can also do The Reindeer Pokey, sing Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and even have children put their reindeer up, down, behind their back, over their head, between their legs etc. so that you can assess spatial directions.

Plus it's a great way to get the wiggles out at the same time. While you're at it, have children identify colors in English and Spanish and review the shapes on the bag.

Call out a body part and have students  touch their reindeer to their nose, shoulder, wrist, ankle, thigh, shin etc as a means of whole group assessing that standard.

So you can review ordinal numbers, have the 4^th reindeer in line take 2 steps forward, have the 1^st reindeer take 2 steps back etc.

Click on the link to view/download the Reindeer Lunch Bag Puppet.

A fun way to review some basic shapes as well as that more difficult 3-D cylinder shape, is with this adorable Santa windsock.

Santa’s hand print beard, makes this an adorable keepsake!

Click on the link to view/download the Cylinder Handprint Santa.

Another shape that we study is the oval. Making a Christmas mouse and then tucking a candy cane in a slit for a tail is great fun.  A pom pom nose reviews the sphere shape as well.

Your little ones can easily whip these together after a mouse-related December story.

Click on the link to view/download the Candy Cane Mouse.

Thank you for visiting today.  Feel free to PIN anything that you think others may find helpful.

“Take the attitude of a student.  Never be too big to ask questions.  Never know too much to learn something new.” –Og Mandino