Classroom Christmas Tour, 2025

 Hello! This is a really random post to share in January, but here is a quick tour of my classroom decorated for Christmas last year. 

Maybe it can provide some future inspiration for Christmas 2026. The lights came from both thrift stores and Amazon (specifically the star LED lights came from Amazon). The brown ribbon was bought in a huge bulk roll from Amazon. It was around $10, decorated my whole bedroom, classroom, was used to embellish gifts, used for hair bows, and I still have tons left! The bells came from Dollar Tree but I painted them to look vintage. The garlands and pine cones came from thrift stores. I probably paid a total of $5 or less for them. I did run out of those and buy one strand from Walmart, which is unreasonably expensive, as it turns out. The other decorations I had on hand from thrift stores or they were given to me as gifts in years past.  

I hope you enjoyed! Thank you for visiting! 

Blessings,

Lauryn 

Custom Keychain Gift Idea for Students

 Hello! Tonight I'd also like to share a gift idea I did for my students last Christmas as both an end of the semester and Christmas gift in one (also because I literally did not have any time to celebrate those two occasions with separate gifts). I have no regrets about this and liked the result, but disclaimer: these take an insane amount of time. Like they took me at least fifteen minutes each to put together, decide on the designs, tie, and hot glue. I multiplied that by thirty-eight students which I should have done before starting this project since I have almost zero time management skills and no sense of time passing. The number I came up with is approximately a minimum of nine and a half hours. I am pretty certain it took hours over that. 

That said, it is very time consuming. That is just for the keychain part, too, not counting the packaging part. I think I made the labels on Canva but could not find the printable to add in below. I bought the ribbon in a bulk roll from Amazon and still have plenty to spare months later. The beads came from a variety of kits I bought off of Amazon and then stole from my brother because the kits I bought ran out, so for thirty-eight students I should have bought three or four kits instead of two. Each keychain featured the student's name, and two large beads I thought they would like (such as a smiley face, bow, star, and so on) or three or four smaller ones (I tried very hard to make them all equal). 

The pros are that these are both pretty and practical, and they are very personalized. These could really be given to any age and any group of people, too. 

Thank you for stopping by, I hope you find this idea helpful! 

Blessings,

Lauryn

Character Mindmap Book Review Project (& "When Stars Are Scattered" Activity)

This amazing lesson came from a book given to me by a co-worker called "100% Engagement" (Grades 6-12) by Brian Sztabnik and Susan Barber. This project is called a "character mindmap", where students chose a character from our class book ("When Stars Are Scattered" by Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed), draw them, then identify and label the following to show they truly read the book and understood the character: 

-A thought bubble. What would this character be thinking about?

-A belief under their feet. What beliefs do they hold?

-Something in their hands to represent what they give, their responsibilities, and/or burdens they carry. 

-A challenge they overcame or way they grew in the story written by their leg to represent the difficulties they walked through. 

-A heart labeled with their deepest desires. What do they most want?

Below is a checklist I used as the rubric from the book mentioned above. This assignment aligns with the high school ESOL WIDA standards, though I did not include the standards it meets. 

I loved the result of this assignment. I was so proud of my students' creativity and hard work! I hope if you are an educator you find this helpful to implement in some form in your classroom. I also highly recommend both of those books. Thank you for visiting! 

Blessings,

Lauryn

Halloween English Lessons & Classroom Halloween Party, 2025

 Hello, here is yet another class party I would like to share from last semester. Halloween fell on a school day, so I celebrated with a class Halloween party that incorporated their class projects from the week. 

One project, which I saw on TPT, is making synonym/antonym gravestones and ghosts. I found some free gravestones to print. They had to write their choice word with five synonyms on the front, followed by five antonyms on the back. They could research synonyms and antonyms on Google. That was completed after an introduction to synonyms and antonyms on the Monday prior, so I drew grass and made a graveyard/ghost display.

The other assignment that ended up taking all week or longer was a symbolism mask assignment. Students were to draw ten images on one side of their mask designs that each symbolized something about them (what they believe, love, the hobbies they do, their personality, anything). On the other side, they were to write out ten "I am..." statements to describe themselves, applying repetition and more specifically, anaphora. On Halloween day they all got to 'dress up' and we did a class photo in each class featuring everyone in their masks. 

I planned several Halloween-inspired English games as well. One was to design a pumpkin on paper that clearly included symbolism and was themed around a particular book, character, or movie. Another used charts and involved rolling die to prompt a scary creative story. My favorite was where they worked in pairs with whiteboards. One partner had to describe a monster with as many adjectives as possible while the other partner had to draw it. They had five minutes and had to face away from each other until the drawing was done, then everyone revealed their masterpieces and partners swapped roles. Examples of some of these activities are shown below.

As far as the decorations go, I got the spiderwebs, spider dish, and balloons from Dollar Tree. I cut some paper plates into hexagons to look more web-like, too. The treats came from Aldi and a dollar store. 

Thank you for visiting, I hope you find this helpful! 

-Lauryn