Guess Who? Christmas Riddle Fun

My kiddos love riddles and they are great for helping my ELL kiddos develop vocabulary by using descriptive language. We play this game with blends and compound words so I quickly made one with Christmas words...and my kiddos LOVED it! We played today and they were very excited to then write their own Christmas Riddle.

Here is a picture of the trail game.

This game has no beginning or ending starting point. The player (or team) that has the most pairs at the end is the winner. A player draws a card and reads the word and moves to that picture or the player draws a riddle card and reads the riddle THEN moves to that picture. The players are trying to match the word card to the riddle card that describes that word. There are also special cards to take another player's card or one to trade a card. This really brings in the problem solving in deciding which card they should trade or take.

After we played, they wrote there own Christmas riddles. Here are a picture of 2 of them. We were still working when it was time to go so I was only able to get a few pictures. They are turning out really CUTE!

Click on the picture to grab your copy!

Please let me know if you have any questions about how to play. I would also love to know if you would like me to share my compound word riddle game and the one for blends. You know how much I LOVE your heart notes!

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The Morning Greeter

This is one of my favorite School Family Jobs and it is just too stinkin' cute!  As my kiddos come to the room in the morning they stop at the door.  The child who is the greeter comes to stand at the door and puts on the greeter apron.  He or she then says "Good Morning _______" and the child being greeted answers back, "Good Morning ________".  Then the greeter asks, "How are you today?" and the child being greeted answers and asks the greeter how are they doing. The greeter then asks, "How would you like to be greeted?"  We usually have 3 choices of ways to be greeted and you could do more.  I always try and have a non-touching one for the kiddos who don't like to be touched and one way is ALWAYS a hug.

I have at my door the sentence stems for the kiddos to remember what they need to say(This is great for your ELL kiddos and all kiddos because it is great practice learning to speak in complete sentences).  Underneath that are the pictures that represent the different ways to be greeted.  I went to Hobby Lobby and picked out lots of the cute wooden shapes.  Later on in the year the class can come up with a way to greet that represents that shape.

Here is a picture of some of the shapes we use and love.

If you don't want to buy the shapes you can use these icons.

greeting icons

frog greeting: children jump up and down and say "Have a hop, hop, hoppy day!'

heart greeting: a hug

five greeting: high five

butterfly greeting: butterfly handshake, lock thumbs, extend fingers like butterfly wings, flutter up and down
butterfly graphic by Scrappin Doodles

greeter reminders

Here is how it looks by my door.

Keep checking back for more posts like this about Conscious Discipline! I would love a heart note letting me know what you think.