Chinese New Year

Of course we had another busy week! In order to finish up our pumpkin study, we created posters about the life cycle of a pumpkin. There are 6 steps in the life cycle: seed, seedling/sprout, vine & leaves, flower, green pumpkin, orange pumpkin. We made a sign up sheet and each student chose which stage they wanted to work on.

The groups worked together to create an illustration of that specific stage, a label, and a sentence or two about what happens in the stage.

 We finished our letter J & W cards for our word wall. We are getting really close to finishing learning our alphabet and only have a few left! 

 We also finished working on our orange mosaic and are now working on our purple mosaic. 

We added a couple new workstations as well. Carson is matching the number on the pumpkin card to the correct number of dots in the tens frame. Soleil is finding the correct penguin with the missing number to complete the number sequence.  

Braxton is putting the pumpkins together to create words and sounding them out in order to figure out what word it spells.

 The students earned their Brown color word book. The only color words we have left to learn are black and pink!

We are participating in a Holidays Around the World study with a few other classes in the school. Each class will learn about the holiday that one country celebrates and then share what they have learned with the other classes through presentations. We will be learning about the Chinese New Year! I told the students about my trip to Hong Kong in 2010 and they were very interested to see some of the things I brought back so I brought in a few things to share with them. My husband, Micah, and I both got our names written in Chinese and the kids were really interested in this! Keep reading to find out what we did to continue their interest. I also brought back a dragon figurine since according to the Chinese zodiac I was born in the year of the dragon. I also shared a post card showing the big buddha statue in Hong Kong, chop sticks, and two decorative fans. 

 After reading many books about the Chinese New Year, we made a list of the important aspects we wanted to include in our presentation. These are the things they wanted to share with the other classes: Chinese flag, the story of the zodiac, dragon dance, the year of the horse, fireworks, food, drums, lucky money envelopes, Chinese calligraphy, lanterns, and how to say something in Chinese. We have a lot to get done and not a lot of time, (we are presenting on December 15th) so we got right to work! I found this CD at the library that has traditional Chinese dragon dance songs that we will use in ours during our presentations. The students were very excited to listen to the songs and they even pretended like they were doing a dragon dance along with it.

 We started with making paper lanterns to decorate our room. Red means good luck and is used in most of the decorations for the Chinese New Year. So in turn, most of our decorations will be red as well. We completed our lanterns in steps and the first step was to fold our piece of construction paper "hot dog" style.

 Then we drew a line with pencil about an inch down from the top.

 We then drew lines about an inch thick from the bottom (the fold) to the top (the open side). We used our small muscles in our hands to cut along the lines very carefully.

 The students decorated their lanterns if they wanted to, some chose to leave them plain red. Lastly, we cut a strip of paper for the handle and taped it on. After carefully following all of these instructions, we all had beautiful paper lanterns!! They all turned out so great!

After school on Friday I hung our completed paper lanterns up around the room. I can't wait for the students to see them when they come in on Monday!

We created sign ups for the other elements to our presentations and the students signed up. Each student will be in 2 groups. Half the class would be participating in the retelling of the story of the zodiac and the other half will be working on the dragon dance. Along with these choices there are five more groups that the students could choose from. They get to chose between the Chinese flag, the year of the horse, food, fireworks, and drums. For example as you can see below Betsy chose to be in the following groups: the story of the zodiac and fireworks. Myla chose the dragon dance and food groups.

 Each student decorate their own Chinese symbol "Fu" which means good luck to use for decoration around our room.

 Like I mentioned, the students were really interested when I showed them my name along with Mr. Garrabrant's name in Chinese. I looked up each of their names in Chinese and they are working on copying the symbols in order to make their Chinese name. These are turning out so great and I can't wait to see them all when they are done!

 We learned that in China they give out lucky envelopes with money inside of them and the students decided they wanted to make one for each student who is coming to our presentations. We have 4 classes coming with around 26 kids in each class so we have a lot to make! Once we paint them red, we will make paper money to put in them as well.

We also learned that "Gung Hay Fat Choy" means Happy New Year in Chinese! We still have so much work to do but the kids are really enjoying it so I am excited to see what else they come up with! Thanks for checking in!

Have a great week everyone! Here are the important dates for this week:

*Wednesday, December 10th- QPT Day- Early Dismissal- the students will be released at 12:00, noon.

*Friday, December 12th- Scholastic Order In 

Mrs. Brittany Garrabrant