Sunday, December 13, 2015

Chinese New Year, Senior Citizen Luncheon, & More!

Of course we had another busy week here in Kindergarten! We have been working so hard on our Chinese New Year study and getting the projects ready for our presentations next Friday! We made goodbye cards for Miss Croston, prepared for and sang in the Senior Citizen Luncheon, learned more lowercase letters and read the alphabet books to match them, worked with our preschool reading buddies, and more! Check out below to see the details of what we were up to this week.

Here are the pictures I forgot to post last week of our paper lanterns hanging in our classroom! 
We made cards for Miss Croston since her last day was Wednesday. We presented them to her as well as telling her thank you for helping us this semester and goodbye. We talked about some of the things we wanted to say to her and I wrote them out for the students so they could spell them correctly. I started the sentences for them and the students had to do their best to sound out the rest of the words. They did such a great job!

Thank you for all of your help this semester Miss Croston, you were awesome! Come back and visit us anytime, we will miss you!
Thursday was the Senior Citizen Luncheon. Not only had we been practicing singing the songs in music class for the last couple of weeks, but we also practiced with all of the other classes singing in the gym every morning before the performance. The students did a great job for the big day using their loud but beautiful singing voices!

    
The rest of the students finished writing their name in Chinese for our bulletin board. They all did a great job.
We have been researching everything we need to know about the Chinese New Year by reading lots of books as well as looking at pictures and videos on the internet. One of our friends Daniel even shared a personal video with the class about a dragon dance he saw which was really exciting! I also found a book at the library of Chinese New Year crafts that the students could be making and we put it in the art area for inspiration.

We discussed the important aspects of the Chinese New Year celebrations and split into groups so we could create the various projects. The students got to sign up for what groups they wanted to work in.

Half of the class will be participating in our dragon dance and half of the class with be retelling the story of the zodiac.

We also split into the following groups: firecrackers, red envelopes, drums, year of the sheep, food, Chinese flag/map.
Each of the groups worked together to make a poster for the hallway that showed what they were focusing on.
This group worked on making the Chinese flag by cutting out stars and gluing them onto the flag.
 The dragon dance group worked on making scales for our dragon. All of the scales are drawn on now and we will begin coloring them next week.
 The story of the zodiac group was busy drawing their animals to make their puppets. They followed step by step directions to draw it, then colored it in, drew a black outline around it, and cut it out. Then we glued a popsicle stick on the back to make it into a puppet. We will use theses puppets to retell the story of the zodiac.
Here are a few of the puppets so far.
We also learned that children in China get lucky red envelopes filled with money called "Lai See". We have been working on painting envelopes red and this week we made the money to go inside of the envelopes. We drew many rectangles on a page of green construction paper, wrote a numeric value in each corner, drew a face in the middle, then cut them all out.
Once all of the money was created, then we had to stuff all of the envelopes! Some envelopes have 2 dollar bills in them and some only have 1. We made enough envelopes for all of the classes coming to our presentations!
2015 is the year of the sheep according to the Chinese zodiac. The year of the sheep group chose to make sheep masks with paper plates. They turned out so cute!
Isaac is saying "Baaa".
The Firecrackers group wanted to use toilet paper rolls to make firecrackers. We started by coloring the whole roll red. We will decorate them next week.
We learned 6 new lowercase letters. We only have 3 more to do this week and then we will be done with the alphabet!!
 We also began working on our Christmas presents for our parents this week. I will post more about these in next week's post.
As always, we enjoyed sharing our work with our preschool reading buddies. We shared stories that we have written about the Chinese New Year and practiced reading alphabet books with them as well.
 Our bulletin board shares with others what we have been learning about with our Chinese New Year study so far. It says "Welcome to China." and "We learned about the Chinese New Year.". 
 The posters showed what the different groups were focusing on.
 The students' Chinese names turned out awesome! We also made one for Room 207 as well as Mrs. Garrabrant.
Don't forget about our Chinese New Year presentations for parents @3:00pm this coming Friday, December 18th in our classroom. We hope to see you all there!! 

Thanks for checking in and seeing what we have been up to. It's going to be yet another busy week! Have a great week! 

Mrs. Brittany Garrabrant

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