The Smells from Room 10

Did that get your attention? Generally, my room just smells like a room full of 6, 7, and 8-year olds... which *fortunately* doesn't really smell like much. But, we've been having some tell-tale-holiday-smells for the past few days:

Last week we made our parent Christmas gifts- the reindeer ornaments and tissue-paper-covered-jar-luminaries which I have neglected to take a picture of.

So, for two days, my room smelled like aerosol sealant... And the hallway. And probably everyone else's rooms at my end of the building.

But... today... another smell came wafting out of my room. Something much more pleasant... gingerbread!

We read gingerbread books, compared and contrasted them, wrote about gingerbread characters, and made gingerbread play dough!

During the making of the play dough, I realized we should use the cookie cutters to each make and bake an ornament... so then that happened and the smells of warm cinnamon, ginger, and cloves wafted through the room... drawing many a curious nose into my classroom! :)

Tomorrow we're going to use acrylic paints to paint our ornaments which I will then seal with the aerosol... thus reverting back to the original smell of crafts and memories!

Check out the pictures from our work today!

Each group worked together to mix their dough... here's the recipe:
2 c. flour
1 c. salt
2 T. vegetable oil
1 c. water
3 t. each ground cloves, ginger, and cinnamon

Mix, mix, mix and then separate for each kid. After we played and cut out shapes, we bagged it to take home!

I brought in all of my Christmas cookie cutters and we made lots of shapes!

Then each kid chose one of their shapes and we baked them in my neighbor-teacher's little oven at 250 degrees for about 30 minutes. Don't forget to poke a hole in the top of each with a straw before baking!

Then we read Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett and went to the computer lab where we made these on ABCYa.com!

Tomorrow's agenda is more gingerbread stuff including making and eating cookies, lots of writing, painting our ornaments from today, spraying them with smelly stuff when the kids leave, and then I'll be prepping for our Christmas party on Wednesday!

Have a great week!