Polar Express Day

We LOVE Polar Express Day in our classroom. Even in upper elementary you can take this week and engage your students in rigorous content!

You don’t have to decorate your classroom to make this week memorable, but it doesn’t hurt!

First, I set up a train in my classroom. All I did was put my tables in a long row and line my table with black paper.

Then, I cut out a red and yellow circle and a black steam/smoker!

Then, you have to tape it to a ruler unless you use thick construction paper. We used hot glue to make it stick to the paper on the table!

With every train you need a conductor!! How cute are these hats that my bestie teacher made?!

We put train tracks all throughout the hallway. This was the BEST part! I was laughing so hard because every kid that walked through the hallway stayed inside the tracks. Every kid no matter the grade level enjoyed walking down our hallway that day and it sparked excitement for my kiddos.

Of course you need a railroad crossing sign coming into your classroom! 😉

On the final day of the week, it was PJ day! I LOVE LOVE LOVE PJ day, except whenever I wear PJs to work I get nothing done!

We had a hot chocolate bar for the kiddos. I just bought two gallons of milk and heated in my crockpot all day. Our elf brought us marshmallows and candy canes to add to our hot chocolate!

In math we started with a word problem race! This race earned the kids a ticket to the North Pole, which started our fun for the week!

>>>Grab this race for FREE here<<<

• We work on bar graphing our favorite Christmas moments
• We do a line plot activity where students bring in an item from home
• We practice multiplication and division during a Let’s Save Christmas activity
• We work on area and perimeter while we create our own North Pole
• We create a train using shapes
• We do another word problem activity too!

Reading for the Week

Well we obviously start with reading the book. We read it several times while we complete many activities with it!

• We visualize different parts of the story before actually reading the entire story
• We do many vocabulary activities to practice rigorous words from the story and end with a quiz
• We work with figurative language with four different fun activities
• We make a character trait graffiti wall and do an acting activity
• We do a theme close read
• We do a point of view comparison
• And of course we take a comprehension quiz

Writing

Writing is my favorite this time of year! For this unit we do SO much fun writing.

• We use imagery writing to write about Christmas morning after analyzing imagery writing in the story
• We do letters to Santa at a higher level
• We write a compare and contrast essay with the book vs. the movie

 Social Studies

For social studies we talk about geography first. The students create their own world and color each content according to the climate that continent has! Then, we research the history of trains and create a timeline to show the history.

Have a wonderful Polar Express Day!!!