Kansas City Christmas!

Good Evening and Merry Christmas! I hope you all had a fabulous holiday with your loved ones, I know I did! I decided to blog about the first half of Christmas break and there will be a later blog from this point through New Years! I have accomplished a lot back home so far, and I have pictures to prove it!

I made a few gifts for Christmas this year thanks to PINTEREST, so here were the final results of a few :)

 I bought a mason jar ($2 at Hobby Lobby) and printed off a B&W picture of Cam and I and suspended it in oil and here was the result! Hopefully he loves it (he will be here in a little over an hour to celebrate Christmas with my family :)

I made Brandon a cash Christmas tree thanks to Pinterest :)

I also have worked some and we got to do some fun Christmas things including riding a bus all decked out for Christmas and making sugar cookies!

 

Of course we did the typical Christmas-y things including baking, wrapping, and looking at lights!

Our cookie tray we gave to Cam's parents :)

 

Lots of yummy hot chocolate :)

 Cam made breakfast one morning :)

 Lots of present wrapping

 GORGEOUS houses decorated for Christmas!

Starbucks as we site see :)

 

And of course, celebrating with family through food, worship, and presents :)

 

  Celebrating with Cam's family :)

 

 Bria and I on Christmas Eve :)

 

 Teacher stuff!!

 

 Brandon reading...shocking!!

 

 We both got Sparkling Snow candles ;) :) :)

 

 Just before this picture was taken, Brandon was doing lunges to stretch out his new jeans. HA!

 

 My lemonade holder! Bring on the party planning :)

 

 Dad was real excited about his surprise Ugg slippers!

 

 We pretty much demolished the family room floor!

 

Now I am anxiously awaiting Cameron to get here so we can open our gifts from each other and his gifts from my parents and mine from his! We have gotten to spend lots of time together this break which has been awesome since we will be apart next while I am in KC student teaching. We went on our annual Christmas date and this year I surprised him with tickets to Trans Siberian Orchestra and then we went to McCormick and Schmicks for dinner! :)

 

  Enjoy the rest of your Christmas and I will update again soon!

 

Until then,

Brittany

Christmas Things in the Little Apple

Good Afternoon!

It feels like I haven't posted forever!! It seems that portfolios, projects, papers, and finals were taking over much of my time. But don't worry, I still made time to celebrate Christmas in the midst of hustle and bustle of school! I will stop talking and just post a bunch of pictures of Christmas in Manhattan :)

After going to the Holiday Christmas Home tour in Kansas City, I gained some awesome ideas of ways to decorate for Christmas in your house!

 I loved this! You can buy Christmas boxes (or just wrap some of your own) and place them on top of a cake stand, wrap a ribbon around them, and you have a cute centerpiece for your kitchen table!

Cute idea to do with kids hands and feet to create a Christmas tree and Rudolph!

A festive way to store all your Christmas cookie cutters!

Buy a bunch of containers (the Dollar Store has great options) and decorate with food/candy! Marshmallows, peppermints, M&M's, red hots, and jelly beans are all festive options!

 Take an old frame, spray paint it red, and add some bells and white feathers and you have a cute thing for the door or wall!

SO cute and festive ;)

After seeing so many great ideas from the house tour and pinterest, Kayla and I decided to go shopping at Target and the Dollar Store to try and re-create some things for the Penthouse :)

 Kayla and I had a date night and went to Target and the dollar store and purchased decorations for the season :)

The glass containers were from the Dollar Store and then we filled it with red hots and peppermints and set on our table ;)

Kayla wrapped yarn around an old wine bottle and then we put these candle holders in front of it

All the flowers were from the Dollar Store, but who would ever know?!?!

The TV area all done :)

 Shelbi conned Cam into helping her hang the lights...

 

...he was obviously super excited to help ;)

 Kappa Christmas date party!!

We decorated cookies at the Education Ambassador Christmas party!

 

 

 

Fellow Ambassadors :)

It was a fun month in Manhattan celebrating Christmas with some great people! I just moved back home for student teaching next semester...ah I can't believe it's already here!!! Enjoy your winter break and I will post again soon with some more pictures from the break :) :)

Until then,

Brittany 

Sailing Through 6th Grade: Last Week :( :(

Well, who would have thought that I would be putting :( by the end of my time in 6th grade! (In the beginning I thought I would be SOOOO relieved to be done!) But alas, those kids changed my opinions! No, 6th grade still isn't my first choice to teach, but I wouldn't flip out if I got hired to teach it (I'm still crossing my fingers that doesn't happen though :) We taught some really fun lessons our last week there, and even threw a little party our last day there! First up, outfits (you are going to be sad when I don't post these anymore, I just know it!)

 On Tuesday and Wednesday we did a combined lesson on persuasive writing! We began with some SUPER fun stories to demonstrate the elements of persuasive writing...

 This book was hilarious and engaging and the kids absolutely loved it! It is written in letter format (which tied into the second half of our lesson) and the main character is writing letters back and forth to his mom convincing her to buy him an iguana! This is a must read, I promise you won't be disappointed!!

This was another cute book about a girl who convinces her parents to get her ears pierced because, "Everyone in the whole universe has their ears pierced!!" 

 A little boy is faced with the dilemma of squishing an ant or not, and the ant does his best to convince the boy not to!!

As we read the books to the kids, they filled out a table that had questions about the elements of persuasion found in each book (Intended audience, word choice, ethos, etc). After we completed this half of the assignment, we told the students they would be writing persuasive letters to their teacher, Mrs. Olberding, convincing her to change something about their 6th grade classroom. The kids got so into this idea and some of their topics they wrote about were just hilarious. Before we got started, we reminded the kids of proper letter format (since many of them had already forgotten!)

  We also told the kids about "Double Stuffed Persuasive Writing," which taught them the format of how to write their letters.

 This was a great resource I found on Pinterest (duh) and the kids loved the visual it provided. As they finished their completed letters, they got a double stuffed Oreo as a reward (Yes, sort of bribery on our part, but it worked well!)

On Thursday we played a Jeopardy game with them to recap our Economics unit and they did so well! There were a few concepts they had forgotten over the course of the month, but they did so well for the most part, we were very proud!

Since it was our last day, of course I needed to bake something for them to thank them for letting us come into their classroom :)

The kids loved them!!

 

We also got this precious letter from one of the little boys in the class. This type of stuff makes it all worth it!!

This week we are back on campus to do some wrap up of our time in the schools and turn in the dreaded...

  At least mine is done and complete and ready to be turned in! One step closer to student teaching so that makes me very happy and excited! I had a wonderful experience in 6th grade and although it was challenging, it was such a growing experience for me and I will never forgot the students I interacted with. But now, onto bigger and better things...3rd grade at Sunset Ridge, here I come!!!!!!

I'm turning this puppy in today, and then I'm onto the next adventure!!

Until then,

Brittany