Massive Update 1/3

Wow, it`s been over a month since I`ve updated! So much to talk about! So this post is going to be divided into multiple entries just for the sake of my sanity.

Near the end of December I had a week of too-much-to-do when my Christmas week rolled around for Ono-chu (JHS). I had promised that everyone who participated in my English point card system would get a present (stupid idea) and I wasn`t going back on my promise. So I spent that week and the week before separating small 100-sticker Disney packs by size and pinning groups of 5-10 of them together with small colored wooden clips. While I have sworn never to do this again it did win me a lot of points with the students (and teachers for some reason) for being too stubborn to quit. And luckily because I was willing to work for my cheapness I did not break my bank account. I don`t want to know how many of those sticker packs I bought though! I watched a lot of movies, too.

The funner part of that week was that I got to make Christmas crafts with all of my students. For my JHS first-years we made paper snowflakes. This actually flew really well despite my worries it might be too easy and we taped up a lovely blizzard on their class windows. The second years got to make star ornaments. That was really fun, too! They all picked out two star outlines in their favorite color and decorated them before gluing them together into a 3-D star. (click here to see the instructions) I changed the template on my computer to print as many as possible on the colored paper we have so it was really easy to make enough outlines. The third years were by far the best though, we made Christmas cards. I gave them the base paper, printed clipart, colored pencils, ribbon, and time they needed to come up with some amazing cards. We had everything from hand-drawn art to pop-up cards to amazing pictures made from cutting out colored paper and gluing it down. And since every grade did a different craft, next year if I can`t think of anything new and exciting we can do the same thing again.

I had my elementary students doing crafts like paper snowflakes and card templates where they could draw their own picture on the front and the like. That flew really well, too!