Punchbowl Celebration Hop! Ideas, Freebies and a Giveaway!

I am so privileged to be a part of the Primary Punchbowl girls and our collaborative blog is celebrating its first anniversary. Hard to believe that it has been a year already. Time flies when you are having fun!

To celebrate we are having a blog hop of fun celebration ideas to use in the classroom. As well as, a freebie at each stop, sales in our stores and the chance to win a $50 Target gift card! Who doesn't love Target, it is one of my favorite places to stock up on classroom essentials.

Often times a celebration in the classroom means CHAOS! It strikes fear in the hearts of teachers everywhere, well maybe not quite that dramatic! I for one, cannot deal with craziness, so several years ago I started running stations for my parties/celebrations.  You may be saying to yourself, that sounds like work? Well let me me tell you, that the little bit of preparation time that I spend before the party makes all the difference in us having a fun relaxed event, and me wanting to pull my hair out.

I choose to have 4 stations for each party. One of those is a food station. We usually decorate cookies, or cupcakes, or gingerbread, or even with fruit if you are required to keep it healthy,  you get the picture. They love it and with only having 5-6 kiddos at the table at a time it doesn't turn into a huge mess.

Once they have decorated their treat they get a juice drink and go to another table to eat their creation while I start with the next group.

Another station idea is some type of coloring or writing activity. I know you are probably thinking, this is a party are you for real. Well, my kiddos really love it. It could be the fact that I put all kinds of fun markers, colored pencils and watercolors at this station for them to use when illustrating their picture. For our Halloween party last year, they drew a picture of themselves in their costume. They wanted to actually stay extra time at this station. For Christmas, they drew a picture of what they wanted from Santa and wrote about what they wanted and why. For Valentine's, I threw scraps of construction paper in a bin, gave them scissors, glue and markers and they made cards. Krista Wallden of Creative Clips offers several sets of themed color pages that work great too! The possibilities are endless.

For my third station I like to have a hands on activity. One of my favorite activities is a pin it activity, the kiddos love this one too, and it is awesome fine motor practice as a bonus. They have a picture made of dots on a paper that is stapled to a piece of construction paper. Students use a pushpin to poke into the paper on top of all the dots. When they take the top pattern off it makes a neat picture when held up to the light or hung on a window.  Last year I found some fun halloween themed lacing cards in the Target dollar spot that we used for our hands on activity for that celebration. You could even just put out a bucket of legos, some idea cards and it would be a STEM station. Let your imagination run wild.

For my final station I usually offer a math type activity. Typically it is a candy graph. I have a baggie of goodies for each student. When they get to this station they grab a bag and a recording sheet. They sort and graph their candy, fill in their recording sheet and once they have competed that they can eat their candy.  I don't usually count out each bag exactly, I just throw a few of each item in and zip it up. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

If you want to download this free recording sheet to save for Valentine's Day just click HERE!

There you have it my secret to stress free classroom celebrations/parties! People are often amazed when they come in our room during parties and we have festive music playing and all the students are engaged in different activities. Hope you found something you can use to make your parties run smoother.

Now for the fun part! My store will be on sale for 20% off during the celebration hop which ends on Monday at 8pm EST. Below you can download my candy corn letter/picture matching activity that will be part of my Fall Literacy Centers pack to be released this week. But be quick, this freebie will only be available during our hop.

Next Click Mrs. Baker's Button to continue through the hop to collect your freebies from each of the punchbowl girls and for your chance to win a $50 Target gift card! Just enter the Rafflecopter on our Punchbowl Blog in the hop! Good Luck and Happy Fall!