Throwback Thursday: More Advent Goodies

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The following post originally appeared on The Teacher's Desk 6 on Dec. 13, 2013.

We are still celebrating Advent, or trying to! It's hard to contain the Christmas spirit, what with all the commercials, TV specials, carols on the radio, and shopping expeditions,  but to wait in patient hope is wonderful! The anticipation of Christmas is tremendous, so to maintain a bit of calm while focusing on the reason for the season is indeed awesome. It is humbling to engage my sixers in conversations about the Advent season. They see its simple beauty and purpose and can talk about their struggles with keeping Christ in Christmas. To help them along, I really try to keep Santa, the elves, and all those kinds of Christmasy things to a bare minimum and focus on Adventish items. Here are a few things I've used this past week. They are yours for the taking just by clicking on each graphic.

Advent Notebook Foldables: The fifth graders and I used these with the popular Christmas novel "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever" by Barbara Robinson. It's a great book to accompany our pageant practice time. First we created an anchor chart that helped us focus on how the author used particular words in her writing (verbs and their tense, adjectives, and adverbs). We used post-it notes to record our ideas as a group, then the foldables to record our individual ideas.

Integrated Language Arts/Religion/Music Activity... I used this with my sixers and my eighth graders. The quintessential Advent song is "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel." I used the lyrics to create a language arts worksheet to help my kiddos practice some grammar skills and become a bit more familiar with the hymn.

Each year I add a few new items to my cadre of Advent activities. This year is no different. I recently whipped up two new SCOOT games to accompany the skills we have been learning and practicing in our Language Arts classes and added them to my TpT Store.

First up is an Advent SCOOT game to help students practice Central Idea.

With this set of Scoot cards students will identify which Advent related word/phrase does not belong in the group of four words/phrases (determining a central idea). These 16 cards may also be used as task cards in a literacy center or for a Scatter/Scavenger Hunt activity.

QR codes are provided for self-checking. Two response sheets are provided for differentiation. The first sheet asks only for the word that does not belong, while the second asks for the word and the reason why the word does not belong.

The second Advent SCOOT activity uses the titles of Advent hymns to provide capitalization practice for students.

These 24 cards may also be used as task cards in a literacy center or for a Scatter/Scavenger Hunt activity. QR codes are provided for self-checking with these cards as well. 

Lastly, here is another song to use as a Language Arts practice activity..."Mary, Did You Know?" This is a great song to practice the comma of address. You can download the lyric sheet HERE or by clicking on the pic below.

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THROWBACK THURSDAY is taking a holiday break. The TBT linky will return on January 15, 2015.

Merry Christmas and a Blessed New Year!