We Joined A Christmas Card Exchange!

When my energetic co-worker, shown below wearing  her Turkey Hat!...

 told me about a Christmas Card exchange I wanted to say nope... not with all that we have going on. I went ahead and signed up and hoped I would be able to keep up!
First I signed up using this link: http://projectsbyjen.com/Projects/HCE2014/HCE14Welcome.html
The whole thing was so organized and I was very impressed!

The theme was Christmas Lights so I made up a card that would fit nicely in our school envelopes. I colored in the tree and reindeer... yes 30 cards! My students colored in the lights and details. I let them use new glitter crayons and they were thrilled!

I made the cards 3 up on one sheet of cardstock. I let them color until they were too tired! They would shake their hands and say I just can't color anymore!

This really didn't take as long as I thought it would and my students had fun!

I sent out 30 cards and we received 29 back... from all over the US and Canada! I waited until the last day of school to open our cards and talk about each of the states. We also graphed the states to see which state sent the most cards.

We don't have a Smartboard, but I can still use the software so I pulled up a map and we made a tally mark on each state as we opened the cards.

Each student opened a card and we read where the card came from and basic info that we all included with our cards. (there was a template to print out)

My TA is holding up a card that had a picture of each student on the letter. Very pretty. We received some very nice cards.

We displayed the cards on our door! My students loved doing this project! I am signing up for sure next year. The hardest part was figuring out how to take the excel file and make labels up! I was pretty proud of myself when I did this!

Merry Christmas to everyone and I hope each of our students has a safe and loved filled holiday!