Mrs. Garrabrant's Classroom: Holidays Around the World, Holiday Gifts, & More!

We had a busy last week before break! We "traveled" to 5 different countries such as Israel, Australia, Sweden, Mexico & China to learn about how they celebrate the holidays. We had a visitor come teach us about how Germany spends their holidays as well. This week, we also made Christmas presents for our parents, had a visit from local firefighters, watched Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and enjoyed hot chocolate with our preschool reading buddies.

In order to get ready for our holidays around the world study, we had to prepare our passports. We filled out our name, school, date, the country where we live, and signature.

First, we traveled to Israel to learn about Hanukkah from Mrs. Addington's class. They taught us about how they celebrate including singing the Dreidel song.

We also made edible dreidels out of marshmallows, pretzels, icing and a hershey kiss.

As soon as we got back to our classroom, we ate our dreidels and then colored the flag of Israel in our passports.

Next, we traveled to Australia to learn about how they celebrate Christmas. We couldn't believe how similar their Christmas traditions were to ours!

We learned that they hold candles and sing Christmas carols so we all joined together to sing carols as we held the candles that Ms. Hopple's class made.

Then we colored the flag for Australia in our passports.

Next, we traveled to Sweden to learn about their traditions. We learned about St. Lucia, star boys, how to say "Merry Christmas" (Gut Jol), goats made out of straw made to decorate the tree, and much more!

Ms. Rigg's class even made us gingerbread cookies to enjoy while we watched a

Swedish Christmas movie.

Then, we traveled to Mexico where Mrs. Gore's class taught us about how they celebrate Christmas.

The Poinsettia is the Mexican Christmas flower. Mrs. Gore's friends helped us make our own poinsettia. They also read their books to us of Mexican Christmas words.

The students enjoyed "traveling" to each country. We pretended to fly in an airplane!

Our friend Lea's mom teaches German and was kind enough to come teach us about how Germany celebrates Christmas. We learned about the Advent Wreath, Advent Calendar, Saint Nicholas, the Smoking Man, and she even brought some yummy german holiday treats to share with us. Thank you again to Mrs. Galaise for coming to share your knowledge about Germany with our class. We really enjoyed it!

The students really enjoyed sharing their knowledge about the Chinese New Year with other classes as well as their families. Thank you to everyone who was able to come see our presentations! Here are some pictures from their presentations throughout the day on Friday.

The students wanted to retell the story of the zodiac so they made puppets of each animal and acted out the story as the video described what happened.

They made a poster of the food they eat during the Chinese New Year.

These groups made Chinese drums and firecrackers. They are used to scare away bad luck.

2015 was the year of the sheep. This group made sheep masks to present. We also learned that 2016 will be the year of the monkey.

The students made a Lai See (lucky red money envelope) for each student who came to our presentation as well as one for every student in our class as well. That means we made 125 envelopes! In China, these are given to children to bring good luck.

We also learned a song called, "Gung Hay Fat Choy" which means Happy New Year in Chinese. We sang this song for our audiences. The students did a great job!

Our dragon was our project that took the longest to complete! We worked so hard to color all of the scales on our dragon. It was such good fine motor practice for our hands and fingers!

It turned out so great and the students were so proud of their dragon!

The students presented a dragon dance for our audience as well.

In literacy lab, we read and colored a holiday book.

The students worked very hard on their Christmas presents for their families. I made tie dye crayons shaped like hearts for each student to color with. The students made trees out of popsicle sticks with buttons glued up the side. The bottom says "Cute as a button 2015-16 Kindergarten". We also added a string so you could hang it on your tree! I hope that you enjoyed your gifts!

I sent them home in these festive bags with fun animal tags!

We had a visit from local firefighters to talk with us about what they look like with their uniforms on and how we should not be scared of them. They had the students promise not to hide from them if there was ever a fire at our house.

We read lots more books about the Chinese New Year, here are just a few! We also finished learning about our last 3 lowercase letters. We have now finished learning about all of our upper and lowercase letters and letter sounds. Keep practicing these with your child.

Since we finished the book, we watched the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The students really enjoyed watching it and comparing it to the book.

On Friday we got to try something different with our preschool reading buddies. They always come to our classroom but this time we went to their classroom! We shared what we learned about the Chinese New Year with them. They had a surprise for us, hot chocolate! I brought in marshmallows for us to add to it as well. The students really enjoyed this!