Holiday Morning Work Collaboration Project

When I started teaching two years ago, I was THRILLED to be able to work at the school where I completed my internship.  I had an amazing mentor teacher.  The school is fabulous along with the staff, administration, kiddos, and community. 

At the end of the 2011-2012 school year I discovered TPT and was in awe of the ideas and products.  I dreamed of joining in, but honestly did not think I could do it. 

Where would I get ideas from?

What programs would I use?

How would I learn to use the programs? 

You buy clipart… what?

The next day an amazing and creative first grade teacher popped in my room and we talked about TPT. I discovered that she had been doing it for a few months.  I checked out her blog and store and oh my word!  I was blown away.  If you don’t know already who I am talking about its’ Lyndsey over at A Year of Many Firsts!

I feel so lucky to be able to work with her everyday!  She is such a sweetie!  We’ve have become great friends all because of this blogging and creating world.  We Facebook message almost constantly.  We meet for coffee to chat about ideas or our never-ending to do lists.  We help each other get our ideas together.  We stay up until all hours of the night working on projects while chatting on FB.  This list could go on and on.  I would consider her my partner in crime !  Honestly, I feel like her boyfriend has to be slightly jealous of our friendship. 

During one of our many chats, we discussed collaborating on a project.  We figured why not, since we talk constantly anyways!  We came up with the idea of creating holiday morning work for our grade levels.  We would create a design together and then develop activities to fit our kiddos.  This coming year our school is switching to heterogeneous groupings for everything.  With that in mind, we both figured we might need differentiated morning work.  I am actually having some of Lyndsey’s kiddos from this past year in my class.  How cool! 

We thought that for Lyndsey’s high-fliers, she could use my 2nd grade holiday morning work, and I could use Lyndsey’s 1st grade holiday morning work for my kiddos who need more basic activities to be independently successful. 

Let me show you and tell you what we came up with!

For each holiday we included 5 pages of activities.  The activities included involve reading, phonics, writing, math, and of course fun!  We created this with the intention of using these for morning work.  (With both of us starting Daily 5 next year, we feel that the students would have plenty of time to select books and complete their morning work during the block.)  But, these could easily be used other times throughout the day. 

In this Fall Themed Holiday Morning Work Packet, the following holidays are included:

-Back to School
-Fall
-Columbus Day
-Fire Safety Week
-Halloween
-Thanksgiving

Since we worked together closely on this project, the 1st grade and 2nd grade versions cover the same topics, which means you could use Lyndsey’s packet to differentiate for those second graders who need more basic activities to be successful independently.

See how the first and second grade versions are similar?

My pack is just a bit more challenging!

In the picture below you can see how easy it is to differentiate using both packs! 

Lyndsey and I are already hard at work on the Winter, Spring, & Summer Holiday Morning Work Packs!

Lyndsey and I will both have our packs 20% off until July 2!

Click on the links below to grab each pack in our TPT shops!

I am giving away two copies (of the 2nd grade version) to the first two people who comment and leave their email addresses!