Holiday-Themed Exercises Get Fairfield Students In The Spirit, Educationally

MASSAPEQUA, NY. — Fairfield Elementary students got in the holiday spirit this week as they created hand-made projects that district officials say, "spark creativity and stimulate their thinking."

The projects came in all shapes and sizes, from marshmallow snowmen to tissue-paper suncatchers, all tailoring concepts already being taught at Fairfiled around the holiday season. In Christina Tomaselli's class, this meant the decoration of paper gingerbread men with stickers and counting how many of each shape were present, as a way of reinforcing lessons on two-dimensional shapes.

For Margaret Kozak's classs, the aforementioned paper gingerbread men — complete with pasta, pretzel sticks and gumdrops — served as a way to practice fine motor skills while learning about horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines.

In Anne Goode's class, students flexed their creative writing muscles by writing messages to their classmates on paper Christmas lights, leaving a personalized message to their friend telling them how they "light up" their classmates' hearts.

For fourth graders in Alexa Brindisi's class, there was a lesson on holiday traditions and symbols, including how lights fit into those traditions, before the students got to make suncatchers out of tissue paper to decorate their classroom windows. The activity, district officials said, reinforced a unit on nonfiction writing.

Finally, third graders in Christine Russo and Alyssa Yablansky's classes performed a joint exercise, practicing their creative and personal essay writing skills by writing about what they would do if they were caught in a snow globe and what their favorite holiday traditions are.