Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Holiday Card Exchange!

Have you ever done a holiday card exchange with your class? This is my first year doing it, and it's actually really exciting. We joined a group through a teacher who runs the exchange every year. She put us into groups of 30 and sent out the class names and addresses.
Two weeks ago we put 29 holiday cards in the mail.
This week... we began receiving our cards! Here is a picture:
I wanted to think of some activities to do with my class now that we have the cards. Friday is our last day of school before our break, so I have a few open blocks of  time.
My first idea was to do some map skills and have them mark the places the cards came from on a state map. This would help them begin to learn the locations of our 50 states since this is part of our social studies curriculum coming up. I also thought about doing some map scale activities. I coiuld pick out a few of the cities and we can figure out how far each card traveled. We can also see which  traveled the furthest and which traveled the shortest distance. They can also compare and contrast the distances and do some problem solving. 

I'd love to hear other ideas if anyone has ever done extension activities with a project like this!