Happy Grinch Day

This past Wednesday at school, all the first grade teachers and their kiddos celebrated our first annual Grinch Day! I'd seen so many posts on other teachers' blogs about Grinch activities they were doing with their classes, so I decided this was something new I wanted to start doing with my students. I mentioned it to my co-workers and our Grinch Day was born! I started making plans for all the fun activities we were going to do for Grinch Day. I went to our local Wal-Mart and found these cute Grinch shirts for us to wear. Our students loved seeing us in our shirts :)

The first activity I had for my students when they came in the classroom was to finish the writing prompt, "To make the Grinch grin, I would ________." I got all kinds of answers from my students but most of them were along the lines of "I would tell the Grinch some funny jokes," or "I would make funny faces at the Grinch." I did have one sweet student say that they would give the Grinch a true Christmas to make him grin. 

After we finished our writing activity, I passed out a Grinch face to all my students and let them color it. Then I tied it around their necks with some yarn. They loved wearing their Grinch necklaces around school that day and told everyone that asked why they were wearing it. They loved letting everyone know we were having Grinch Day!

We read the book "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" by Dr. Seuss, listened to the song "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch, and then watched the cartoon movie that I grew up watching. We had a long discussion about what the book meant about Christmas not being about presents and gifts. Some of  my kids had a hard time wrapping their minds around a Christmas without gifts, but God bless some of my darlings for truly getting it. I had one that boldly said, "Christmas is all about love!" Yes, it truly is :)

While my students watched the movie, I passed out some Grinch treats I made for them-Grinch popcorn, Grinch punch, Grinch cookies :) Can you tell green was the "it" color for the day??

I spent the night before making my Grinch Popcorn. I couldn't find the recipe I was looking for on Pinterest, so I googled it and found this recipe for popcorn here. Some of my kiddos really liked it and ate two and three servings of it, but others didn't like it at all. I used lime Kool-Aid to get the green coloring, so maybe it was the lime flavor they didn't like. Either way it was a fun experience and one I'm sure they'll remember :)

We also drank some Grinch Punch while we watched our movie. I put a scoop of lime sherbert in cups and then poured Sprite over it. I should have brought more of this because my kiddos chugalugged this! They loved it!

After the cartoon movie was over, we watched the new version with Jim Carrey in it. My kids loved that movie, too! A lot of them had never even read the book or seen either movie, so I'm happy that I was at least able to give them this experience.

I made the game "Pin the Heart on the Grinch" on the SMARTboard, but we never got around to playing that game. We had so much fun celebrating the Grinch. I've already thought of so many ideas and things I want to do next year for our second annual Grinch Day. I can't wait!

Before my kids left for the day, I gave them one last treat...a green candy cane attached to this cute poem. This printable came from the very talented Mrs. Cara Carroll. She's such a talented teacher and I get tons of ideas from her! You can find this printable here. 

What a wonderful Grinch Day! I love being able to do fun activities like this with my students at school because these are the days they're going to remember :)