ISM Spotlight – Santa’s Workshop: Winter Craft Rotation

This year I am the luckiest teacher in the world. I get to teach at the best school ever – International School of Morocco, with some of the best, most creative, teachers ever. Each time I walk into someone else’s classroom, I get inspired and we just seem to spiral great teaching ideas off of each other. It’s a wonderful place to teach, and since we are all collaborating, it’s a wonderful place for our kids to learn – a teacher’s dream, right? I have tried and tried to convince the other teachers to create blogs of their own to spotlight and share some of their amazing ideas, but everyone is super busy. Instead, they have each agreed to let me spotlight some of their ideas right here on Raki’s Rad Resources. So, each Friday night, I will be posting an ISM Spotlight.

To celebrate the last week before the Winter Holidays, we did a whole school winter craft rotation called Santa’s Workshop.  We already teach in multiage groups, but for today we further grouped the children into multiage “family groups” of nine students, with each group having children from age 3 to 11.  These groups allowed older students to work with younger students, building leadership skills.  It also gave each group a break from their normal classmates, as they are all ready for a break from each other.

Each teacher hosted a craft, and the family groups moved from one room to another creating winter crafts.  Here are the crafts we offered:

1.  Orange and Clove Pomanders: In Ms. Kadiri’s room, students listened to the story of the Christmas Orange and then made orange and clove pomanders by making small holes in an orange and adding cloves in a multitude of designs.

2.  Toilet Paper Tube Reindeer and Snowmen:  In Ms. Tolentino’s room, students used toilet paper tubes to make snowmen and reindeers.  Ms. Tolentino had all of the pieces pre-cut and the students assembled and added details to these adorable decorations.

3.  Gingerbread Baby Puppet Show Videos:  In Ms. Nassar’s room, students listened to the story of The Gingerbread Baby, and then created props and scenery to film a reenactment the story on the iPad, in person or with puppets.  The results were adorable and all students were able to participate, whether with creation materials, filming, or being the star.

4.  Winter Collages:  In Ms. Johnson’s room, students created collaborative collages using a combination of magazines and student created snowflakes.  Each groups’ collage turned out very different from the others and all are now hanging in the hallway, where students can share their collaborative pride in their achievement. 

5.  Snow Globe & Word Snowflake Cards: In my room, we listened to Walking in a Winter Wonderland, created Winter Wonderland cards.  Each card included: a word cloud in the shape of a snowflake that we created on Tagxedo with a student generated list of words about winter and a paper snow globe show the student’s image of what would be in their Winter Wonderland

6.  Pinecone Ornaments: In Mr. Raki and Madame Gaille’s room, students used paint and beads to create ornaments out of pinecones.  They placed their pinecones in yogurt cups to hold them steady while they were painting.

What winter crafts did you work on this year?

Reversible and Irreversible Candy

Last week before the Winter Holiday, trying to keep the kids focused.  We’re also supposed to be working on our heat unit, specifically introducing reversible and irreversible changes.  So, I decided to make candy!

 

We made two kinds of candy – sugar lollipops and chocolate lollipops.

 

The chocolate lollipops are quite simple – you break apart some dark chocolate, melt it in a pan and put it into molds.  If the chocolate gets too hard while you are filling the molds – apply more heat - hence the reversible part of chocolate lollipops.

The sugar lollipops are a little more difficult, but not much.  I found my recipe on a blog called Funkytime, and decided to use the corn syrup free recipe, which calls for sugar, water, cream of tartar, food coloring and flavor oils – we used strawberry.  After mixing the sugar, water and cream of tartar, you heat until 290 degrees Fahrenheit.  Then, add food coloring and flavor and POUR onto molds. 

 

 

I didn’t read that last direction well and we scooped our candy into the molds – only to have the candy get too hard to scoop, thereby wasting half of our candy.  However, we tried to heat what was left and found that it only got harder, proving the irreversibility of sugar lollipops. 

 

After making and setting our lollipops, we of course had to eat them, and then we filled in a Venn Diagram comparing and contrasting the two processes.

 

How are you fitting learning into the last days before Winter Break?