Mrs. MeGown's Second Grade Safari: The Great Reindeer Rebellion Letter Writing Activities

I'm going to do it. I'm going to actually type up a blog post. It may be a miracle. I had such high hopes that over the break I would blog all about some of our super fun class activities. I planned to share with the world all the awesome things my sweet little class has done so far this school year.

But, instead...

I spent time with my family.

Ate a lot of yummy treats.

Drank a couple cups of tasty coffee (a day).

Went shopping and spent most of my gift cards on new things. Whoo-hoo!

Binge-watched all the Star Wars movies (in order!)

I cannot complain, it has been a great 2 weeks off.
That is what a "BREAK" is all about and I certainly made the most of it!

However, the guilt started to overcome me as I woke up on this last morning of our break. I just had to do something. So here it is. I will take you back in time to 2015, before our winter break to share all about a letter writing activity we did with the book, The Great Reindeer Rebellion by Lisa Trumbauer.

If you haven't read this book, well, you should! It is super cute and this year was the first time I had read it to my class. Thanks to my amazing teammate over at the Polka-Dotted Pencil, for planning writing for our team and coming up with the cute idea.

Basically, it's about the Reindeer going on strike. They are tired of pulling Santa's sleigh and come up with a list of (comical) demands that must be met in order for them to help fly Santa's sleigh again. But before the demands come, Santa seeks out to find different animals to pull his sleigh. But, of course, no other animals work out. The Reindeer are clearly the best option but they have a few requests.

Before the requests were read aloud to the class, I stopped reading there and turned it over to the kids asking, "If you were one of Santa's reindeer, what would you demand?"

We brainstormed some ideas as a class and had a fun class discussion. We reviewed the parts of a friendly letter as the kids would be writing to Santa directly to share their requests.
They were so excited to get started.

I decided to type up some printables to go with it.

First, the kids came up with their plan for their letter to Santa.

Then they used this sheet to write their letter....

Then just as a cute touch, I added this cute reindeer topper from The First Grade Schoolhouse, you can download her cute reindeer template FREE.

Here are some examples....turned out super cute and they had a blast.

Once all of our letters were complete, I thought it would be fun to have students read them aloud TO SANTA!!

Since the big man was quite busy up in the north pole, I pulled up an image on my computer and projected on my screen for the class. They stood up once I called their reindeer name and read them persuasively to Santa. It was so fun!

The kids really got into it.

Here's a cute video of one of my Dancer reindeer reading her letter.

I also added another writing activity to bundle up with this FREEBIE.

This one was for the kids to write about a different type of animal to guide Santa's sleigh. This could also be used with the letter-writing pages in the set.