Polar Express Day!

We celebrated the Polar Express last Friday. The children came to school in their jammies. We then read the book The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg. The students then made golden tickets so that they could get on board. The students had their tickets stamped as they began the incredible journey. The kids watched the movie based on the book while they enjoyed freshly made homemade doughnuts and hot cocoa. We had several moms and dads join us for this super fun day. Some of them even wore their pajamas. A great time was had by all.

Santa Clause, Old St. Nick, Pere Noel.

We are continuing to read with our Fifth grade friends each week. We have been reading previous December Books of the Month. We noticed that in many of these texts, Santa Clause is a character. This led to a discussion about the history of the Santa Clause and his many different names. We discussed several different names for him.
* Santa Clause
* Santa
* St. Nicholas
* Kris Kringle
We then challenged the children to find out any other names they could find for Santa. One Fifth grader, Sarah came back the following week with this list.
* French - Pere Noel
* Welsh - Sion Corn
* Italian - Babbo Natale
* Turkish - Noel Baba
* Vietnamese - ong gia Noel
* Portuguese - Papai Noel
* Romanian - Mos Craciun
* Slovenian - kaledu Senelis
* Latvian - Santa Klauss