Maps and Some Snow Fun

I know a week or two ago I showed you one of the map packets I found, but I never got a chance to show you my all-time, favorite map project.   Back at the beginning of the school year, I signed up for a postcard exchange.  This exchange had one person from each state send postcards to the other 49 states.  I had all of my post cards by the first weekend of November, but kept them a secret from my kiddos.  I knew that they would be perfect for the two weeks we cover map skills.

So, we get to the first week and I know that I want to hang them in the hallway on the map.  I also wanted the kids to find the states and then us run ribbon from the postcard to the map.  The only thing is we had one, little problem.  I had the postcards, I had the ribbon, but I didn't have a map nearly big enough for this project.  So, what's a girl to do?  I went and talked to my instructional coach who also happened to know where I could find a map.  You know those big maps that are on the rolls in your classroom?  Well, several of our teachers took them down when they got their Activboards.  I took a pair of scissors and cut the map off.  Now, if you ever do this, you will realize pretty quickly that it rolls up when you are trying to unroll it for tape.  When that happens, roll your map the opposite way.

Here's a picture of the final product!  We do still have a handful of postcards to add, but I'm pretty excited about how it's looking.   Friends, I have taught first grade for twelve years and if I had a teacher bucket list, exchanging postcards would be one of the things on it.  This is definitely one of my favorite activities I've ever done.

Another project I did that week was this "Me on the Map" project.  I got it from Clutter-Free Classroom.  We read the story "Me on the Map" every year, so this was a nice little project to add to the story.

Then, for writing this week we wrote poems about snow.  This is the little craft we did.  It's based off of           a craft from The Applicious Teacher.  We just used construction paper, felt, chalk (for the snowflakes), and I had spray on fake snow, so we used a little of that, too.  My kiddos picked their scarf and shirt colors and put everything together.  To help it go a little quicker, I drew the main pieces for them to cut out.

Alright, hope you guys have a great day!  I'm going to go work on touching up a few packets and will hopefully knock out my fourth nine weeks morning work.