Most of the ornaments were gifts made by students and other teachers. The little ceramic present was also a gift from a student. I found the letters to Santa mailbox at Home Depot of all places! It gave me a great idea for some extra credit projects during the month of December.
I created my own Advent Calendar! Now, typically advent calendars are filled with little treats or pictures for children to open each day as they count down to Christmas. Well, I modified mine to to fit the needs of my math classroom. Most days were just silly jokes or YouTube videos to watch. One day we made origami Christmas trees - it's really easy! My favorite day was when I hid a picture of a pickle in the classroom and told students the first one to find it won a prize; though most of my students got up and frantically looked around the room, it was the quiet ones that usually found it just patiently glancing around the room. Go figure.
So, for 6 of the days, I put in tasks for students to complete to gain a total of six bonus points. No matter the task, students had to format it into a letter to Santa and place it in my box to receive full credit. What Christmas fun!
Task 1 - Write two haiku poems, one about our current topic in math and one about the holiday season. For the math poem, students had to incorporate a vocabulary word from the current units. I heard a lot about polynomials, derivatives, and areas between curves!
Task 2 - Two mathematical puzzles. One can be found here, and students had to find two DIFFERENT solutions. The other had to do with the 12 days of Christmas. I wanted my students to mathematically show the total number of gifts one would receive from their true love if they were literally given all the things listed on each day. Yay Christmas math!
Task 3 - Draw and color a Christmas scene. I really wanted to reach all student talents with these tasks, so instead of an academic task like the first two, I went with something artistic for this task. Students had to draw, not trace, a holiday scene and color it for the bonus point. I kept some of the really pretty ones.
Task 4 - This was a Wikipedia Scavenger Hunt. I gave students a Wiki page to start on, like the Christmas stocking, and a page to end on, like the Aztecs, and asked them to find the linking page between them. It's not easy. Can you find the page that links these two together? Good luck!
Task 5 - For this tasks I had students create their own memes. They could not use images from the internet. They had to use pictures of each other, teachers, the school, or themselves and make a meme. Some were pretty funny and are still hanging on my classroom walls.
Task 6 - For this last task, I asked students to actually write a letter to Santa. They had to ask for three things - something for themselves, something for someone else, and something for the world.
I was charmed by some of the things my students wrote. I am proud they took the assignment so seriously and asked for some wonderful things, especially for other people. It made the whole advent calendar worth it.
My students really enjoyed these extra holiday activities we did each day as we got closer to Christmas break. As a final send off, I had an in class hot chocolate bar. Yum!
I welcome any new ideas to get my students excited about coming to math class!
Merry Christmas!
Miss Schuck
No comments:
Post a Comment