Craftivity Management and a Freebie

Hello, friends! I hope you all had a great Tuesday! Is it just me or did today drag on forever today?  The 4:00 bell to dismiss the kids couldn't come fast enough.  I have last plan and it makes days like today seem like they last for-ever.

Today we finished our winter unit and I'm a little sad to say goodbye.  We really did have a lot of fun with this unit over the past week or so.

Tonight I'm talking craftivities.  When I taught third grade, I never had the time in my curriculum map to really do any crafty projects with any of our units, the extent was making a foldable book to use as a reading graphic organizer.  However, since moving to second, I've dabbled into the world of craftivities and have loved every minute of it.  :)

My kids this year love to do craftivities too, so I'm lucky.  When we made the soliders from Deanna Jump's Veteran's Day unit, several of them exclaimed "Today is the best day ever!"  So I try to incorporate being crafty into our lessons when I can.

But I've learned a lot since our first crafty project in November where I gave them packets of tracers, some construction paper and said, "Have fun.  It looks like this."  Now I'm sure I said more than that but that was about gist of it.  It was quite the learning experience.

Since then, I've started trimming the extra paper off the tracers and make the construction paper cut more to size.  We then put the pieces of the craftivity together in sections, so if we run out of time at the end of the day, it's easier to stop.  Make sense?  If not, well here's a picture.

All the kids started with the face, hair and hat of their winter kid and then moved on to the body and arms, then the legs and then the mittens and shoes.  Eventually looking like this:

Pretty cute huh?  I think so.  I good chunk of my class is still working on them.  But we'll finish up tomorrow and do a little unit on Martin Luther King before moving on to a study on Africa.

I know every one manages craftivities differently, but that is what works for us in my room this year.  I'd love to be able to  to cut each little piece out on my own, so all the kids have to do is assemble, but I don't have that kind of time and we can't run construction paper through our copy machine.  That itself would be a HUGE time saer.

Instead, I just pick and choose craftivities I can hang up for a long time, like these winter kids.  Honestly, these babies will be up until March.  Generic and cute.  Love it.   On the coats of their winter kids, I had my friends write informational paragraphs about winter that I used as an assessment, gotta love rubric graded writing, for the end of the unit. We used this organizer to help us organize our thoughts.

Click on the organizer to download your own free copy!  :)

If you are interested in my winter unit, I have uploaded it to my TpT store. Click on the picture below to head there. 

I also uploaded the winter kid craftivity separately, just in case you don't need a winter unit but would still love a cute craftivity for winter!  Click on the picture below to pick up your own copy!

I'll be giving away three copies of my Winter Kid Craftivity Templates to the first three people who comment! :) Good luck!

Have a great Wednesday! Our three day weekend is almost in sight!