Christmas, Christmas...oh what a wonderful time of the year!
Here in Kindergarten we began to get in the spirit even before December rolled around.  In mid-November our class took a field trip to the Decoy Museum to make ornaments for our   Festival of Trees tree.  The theme of our tree is Our DownEast Heritage, so our ornaments included duck heads, boats, painted shells and lighthouses. Here's what our tree looked like..

After returning from Thanksgiving break we got right to work thinking about Christmas.  Our first mini unit was about colors, since we see some many different beautiful colors this time of year.  Our two focus books were Brown Bear, Brown Bear and Who Said Red?  We played lots of color word games and made some color charts.  One chart that we made was a tree map of colors.  We have this chart hanging in our room to help us when we need a color word.

We also spent sometime getting our room festive.  We made a December quilt for our outside bulletin board.  Our quilt squares included pretty trees and some special Santas.  Our finished quilt turned out quite beautiful. 

Here are some more photos of our squares..

These cute Santa's were made using our handprints.  Last year we made this as ornaments...but these squares can be a nice keepsake for you to frame.  What a wonderful reminder they will be of this precious time in your child's life!

Our tree squares were made during a direction following activity.  Can you believe our tree began as three green squares and one brown rectangle!

In addition to our quilt we also made a cute Gingerbread Man Tree for our door...

and we made some cute reindeer in art class...

doesn't he look like he is just flying through the air!

Still with all these decorations...one thing was missing...our Christmas tree!  Finally one afternoon, Miss Renee was able to put our tree up and surprise everyone the next morning.  During the last few weeks of December, we added lots of different ornaments.  Many of the ornaments were made as a part of our unit Christmas Around the World.  During this unit, we talked about how children in other countries celebrate the season.  Miss Renee's favorite ornaments on our tree however are handprint snowmen ornaments.

I hope these will hang on your trees for many years to come:)

  So with the tree decorated...there was still one more very important activity we had to complete...writing our letters to Santa.  

For our Letters to Santa, I had the children dictate to me what they wished to say to Santa.  Many of our letters were very short and sweet, especially since our students had to rewrite their letter.

Our letters were posted on one of our bulletin boards in the room.  To make them more festive, we wrote them on huge ornaments.  On the top ornament we illustrated a Christmas picture and then stapled our letters to the top ornament.

Our finished letters looked very nice...

To speed up the process of getting all of our letters online for you to read...I typed them instead of scanning each letter and have posted them on another page.

Click here to see our wishes for Christmas!