X marks the spot

We are eXtremely eXcited that our Animated Literacy letter for the neXt two weeks is X! This week, to help us eXplore X a little bit we watched this great video:

After learning about some eXamples of X words like X-Ray and Xylphone we did an X themed craft.

These are "X marks the spot" treasure maps! (the photos of kid examples don't seem to want to load properly today so you'll just have to practice those coping skills and put up with the teacher example for now, sorry!)
To create these maps the kids used wax crayons on card stock paper to draw out their map. To start we drew a big red X on each piece of paper. We encouraged the kids to generate some ideas about what you might see outside so our maps ended up with lots of houses, cars, and trees, one even features Grandma waiting at home! Once they had drawn out a trail to follow we took the maps and scrunched them up - this was hilarious as the kids didn't know what to expect and gave a look of "oh my gosh, this lady is ruining my craft." To add the finishing touches we opened up our now wrinkled paper and used some orange pekoe tea bags that had been soaking in warm water to dab or rub over the entire piece of paper to give it that weathered look. Some of the kids were a little hard on the tea bags and ripped them, we learned that this made it look like there was dirt on the map so we left it there because it just looked too good.