Christmas Card Exchange 2015

This is by far one of our favorite projects during the holiday season.  It is a Christmas Card Exchange.  Once again I worked with the site Projects by Jen and was put in a group of thirty other schools.  

The theme this year was SNOW!  I couldn't resist finding a card with my favorite animal...penguins.  I love the Santa hats on them.  (Yes of course I found the idea on Pinterest.)  We marked on a chart of the United States where all are cards were going and mailed them by Dec. 1.  The Christmas cards started coming in.  It was so much fun.  

I did something new this year.  I used the smartboard and typed in the address of the school on google maps and then we could see what the school looked like.  

Then I clicked on the star and saved the spot on the map and zoomed out on google earth so we could see if the school was in the city or small town.  This was what we were learning about in Social Studies.  

Then we zoom out further to see where in the United States the school was.

You can see some of the other starred places we went to see and we compare them to were we live.  I used this opportunity to reinforce vocabulary from our Social Studies text book for example: Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean, Canada, Mexico and North America. This was a great way to make the information in the textbook relevant to real life.  

The kids favorite part was zooming way out to see the planet Earth.

Next year my goal is going to be to Skype with another classroom. This is something we have not done yet.  I think it will be fun to try. 

We displayed all our cards in the hallway for the school to share in the fun.