Experimenting with Posting from my Phone

Hi, Everyone, As I was reading Alex's blog about having children make Christmas ornaments to take home, I remembered the invaluable pom pom fork strategy. When my class chose the Alaskan malamute as their mascot and named themselves the Husky Team, we made husky face ornaments out of 7 black and white fork pom poms, two googly eyes, a tiny plastic nose, a red ribbon tongue, and a red ribbon at the neck. Also a gold looped thread to hang it on the tree. 5 pom poms were glued on the dog face background of black felt, basically an oval with ears at the top, then two more on top for the cheeks...wish I had a photo to post but I haven't unpacked my ornaments yet! But the magic of fork pom poms is that they can be made with scraps of yarn donated by children's crafty relatives and they can be put to so many uses in various crafts or kid creations. I used to have children put a short piece of yarn to tie the pom pom through the middle of the fork first, and then weave the yarn in and out of the tines until the fork was full before having someone - a partner - tie the knot tightly as they slid the woven yarn off the fork. None of the websites I visited tonight suggest the weaving - people just wrap the yarn several times around the fork. I wonder if kids would find it hard to tie that way? I guess it depends on the age and dexterity of the kids. Also, we didn't cut the loops, as in these instructions, and our pom poms looked fine. I found was that once children had mastered this little skill, they were quite proud of themselves and wanted to make more!

I hope the extension for blogs was helpful. The due date has now passed and so I am going to begin my final assessment and grading of your blogs today. I hope you will leave your blogs up, though, until the end of January, when your B.Ed. courses are complete, or at least until the start of classes in the new year. Other years, some students have browsed the blogs a bit more over the holidays, just gathering more teaching ideas and staying in touch with their classmates. Thanks for all the thought you've put into them and also for the many beautiful images and inspiring lesson activities that you shared. I will write a final comment here when I have finished with all of them. I am grateful to be able to do this from Saskatchewan - I was able to avoid the snowstorm that was forecast for Alberta!