[play4heat]

Anyone have cute holiday gifts to make for parents? I try to keep it as generic as possible since I have a group that don't all celebrate XMAS. Thanks

[teacher-too]

Hi,
I have a very diverse class as well so we avoid Christmas gifts. We make snowflakes out of silver pipe cleaner. They can cut them and twist them pretty easily. I show pictures of snowflakes and read snowflake facts. We hang them on a tree, in a window and a doorway. That way they aren't just Christmas tree decorations. The day before the holiday break the kids take them home.

[pvs2013]

these cut paper stars are beautiful, highly impressive and only require tape, scissors and white paper! i did them with third graders -- they're a great lesson in how to follow directions, too.

http://www.cutoutandkeep.net/project...aper_snowflake

[tchrgrl28]

You could get a set of 4x4 tiles at Home Depot when they're cheap and have the kids paint their fingers and top portion of palm with tempra paint as snowmen. I had my kids then (when dry) use sharpie's to add details and sprayed shalack stuff to set it (the marker ran just a bit but not bad) Then finally I printed a poem with a snowman boarder, laminated it and hot glued it to the back and it's a sort of coaster. I'll look for the poem but it's something cute like "these aren't any snowmen..."

[digiscrapper]

I would love to read the poem!

[greenapples]

It's rather ambitious, but I'm trying to make a calendar for the next year where each student writes some type of poem or language arts concept like figurative language for each month. (next year this will be a culminating/mom's gift)
I have each child type up their short assignment. Then we do a "rubbing" art that will be the background. They'll cut around the words of their writing, glue it onto their artwork, and then glue the whole thing on construction paper. I'm enlisting a parent to help bind these with calendar pages.

Some we've done so far:
haiku
acrostic
biopoem
Figuratively speaking about weather
Similes: compare members of your family to items in your pencil box
November has their thankful essay.

As I said, this would be a bit easier if I had more time, but then again, when do we ever take the short cut?

[blocker]

I have also done something with tiles. I buy the 4 by 4 tiles and find old Christmas card fronts and decoupage them to the front. Most of the time these worked great, but every once in awhile some edges would stick up. I then hot glued felt to the back of the tile so it could be a coaster. The tiles are really cheap and you can use the shiny ones or the matte ones. Good luck!