Secret Santa Blog Hop - Polar Express Freebie

It's that time of year and I don't know about you, but I'm pretty pooped. Not even from my kids, just from shopping for everyone... plus when did everything become so expensive?! I don't know about you, but a pair of flip flops should not cost $200 (even if they are Tory Burch and super cute and on my list for Santa... shhh!).

Either way, my students are super excited about the holidays this year and about getting presents in their "socks." I'm not sure if you've read my blog post yet over at The Elementary Entourage about how to make this fireplace,

but if not you can read about how to make one so you can hang "socks" up for your kids!

Besides all of the sock fun, I was really excited to read The Polar Express to them. After seeing a lot of pictures on Instagram of you guys having a Polar Express day at school where you can wear your pajamas (first off, totally jealous!), I knew that I had to read it to my class. Even though it's a lot different than the movie, I wanted them to experience the original Polar Express. Plus Educlips had a stinkin' cute set of clip art made just for the Polar Express and I picked that up to create a set of sequence cards for my kids.

In my classroom, I used the cards to recap the story. They worked really well with the kids and we were then able to retell the story using the picture cards afterwards.

Since the cards do follow the movie better than the actual book, there are a few extra cards. You can use them to sequence either the movie or the book, or even to compare and contrast both of them. My kids seem to remember the movie much better (I even had one student say, "What about the little girl?"), so we did have to talk about the differences between the movie and the book. But all turned out well and the kids seemed to really benefit from a different style of retelling.

Don't forget to check out the rest of the blog hop (and the rest of the FREEBIES!) here, or click the picture below.