Grinch Day 2015

Day 2 of Christmas break and I am loving it! I hope that you are having an awesome break too. I figured that since it was almost Christmas I should probably blog about my first ever Grinch Day!  

When I saw all of these awesome teachers doing Grinch Day I knew that I had to do this in my classroom too, but there was one problem. Every classroom that I found online that had a Grinch Day was a primary classroom and I teach 5th grade. The more I thought about it the more that I knew I could have a Grinch Day too, just for big kids. 
I knew that I wanted to incorporate The Grinch in our day as much as possible, so I started with our morning work. Morning work for me is usually a review so I created a Grinch themed math review of diving, multiplying, adding and subtracting decimals and whole numbers to solve the Grinch's code. He said "Merry Grinchmas" of course! 
Next, I included some of the Grinch into your math and reading centers for the morning. Students had a choice to either find synonyms and antonyms for the word "Grinch" or solve Grinchy word problems, which were also review. 
For our reading block we started off reading the story "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and looking for character traits of the grinch. Students worked in pairs to find character traits and evince to support their thinking. Since I only have one copy of the book,  and my students needed to have specific evidence from the text to support their thinking of character traits for the Grinch, I found on YouTube a read aloud version of the story and put it on our Google Classroom Website for students to listen to for their evidence. 

After my kiddos found character traits for the Grinch, they compared and contrasted the Grinch before the stole Christmas and after he stole Christmas. This lesson was a wonderful review for us since we worked on comparing and contrasting characters at the beginning of the school year. 

After everyone had time to work we shared together the character traits that the students found and made an anchor chart. 

Everything we did on Grinch Day was printed on green paper, which was a big hit with the kiddos. We even took our spelling test on green paper. The Grinch took over the backgrounds to our computers, and he even made an appearance at our holiday party at the end of the day. 

I have some pretty awesome parents who went along with the Grinch theme for our class party. I took the picture before the grinch punch made its appearance. 

Some of my parents sent in Who-Pudding and even these awesome Grinch cupcakes. All in all I would say that Grinch Day was a success and this will become a new tradition in my 5th grade classroom. From now on those primary kiddos won't have all of the fun! If you are interested in any of the activities that I used with my 5th grade class you can find them on my TPT store, Grinch Day for Big Kids. I plan on adding teaching notes and pictures to this resource soon. 

I hope you have a wonderful holiday break and enjoy your time with friends and family.