Getting in the Holiday Spirit

First I must say that I'm extremely excited that this is the last full week for us before Thanksgiving break.  (We have the entire week of Thanksgiving off!  :)  More than getting off of school, I love that it allows me the opportunity to go home to NJ to be with my family for an entire week.  I always hated the rush of flying out with everybody else in the country Wednesday night, and flying back the day before another school week.  

In school I've been working on trying to get into the holidays with my students by designing new holiday-themed activities for them.  

One of the more challenging skills that I'm working on through our new Common Core standards is teaching with informational texts.  I'm trying to find creative ways to do this, so today I created my new Black Friday Literacy and Math Activity  I wrote an informational piece about Black  Friday with questions to go along with it.  I was surprised at how much I learned about the origin of Black Friday just by reading up on it.  Here's a quick peak:

To extend my activity, I also created a "mock" Black Friday shopping activity for our math class.  Students will pretend to go shopping at my technology store and use coupons to get Black Friday discounts.  The skills they will use involve decimal multiplication.  Check it out:

This product can be found on my Teachers pay Teachers store here:  Black Friday Literacy and Math Activity

Another popular item I've created to go along with our decimal unit (Numbers in Base Ten) is my tiered activity, Thanksgiving Menu Math.  I've been finding teaching to be a lot more fun when I get myself into the holiday spirit, and my students seem to be enjoying themselves much more as well.

For more information on my items, please check out my Teachers Pay Teachers store.  A link is located on the upper right hand section of my blog.  Thanks for checking in.  I hope you enjoyed another "tidbit" from Terry!