We had a VERY busy week preparing for our Chinese New Year presentations on Monday. We are very proud of their hard work and their projects all turned out so great. The students are so proud of themselves as well as they should be! The kids split into groups and made different projects. Each student was in 2 groups; one being either the story of the zodiac or the dragon dance. The other was either the Chinese flag, the year of the horse, drums, fireworks, or food. Below is our Chinese flag that one group created. We also learned that Happy New Year in Chinese is "Gung Hay Fat Choy!"
We finished up writing our names in Chinese. They all did such a great job and their names turned out so great. Even Mrs. Garrabrant & Mrs. Scherch wrote their names as well!
We put all the names out on our bulletin board and it looks so great!
We discovered that for the New Years celebration in China, they give out red envelopes with money in them. The kids decided that they wanted to make an envelope with money in it for each student who is coming to our presentations (4 classes). So we had a lot of painting to do and we got busy right away! We painted the envelopes red, made money out of green construction paper, and stuffed the envelopes with the money.
The dragon group needed a lot of scales for their dragons! We brought in 7 big boxes that they needed to cover! First we covered the boxes with red paper and the class got busy on cutting scales.
We made scales in many different colors like red, green, yellow, orange, black, and purple. We also learned that the dragon chases the sun so for our dragon dance we made a sun to lead the celebration.
Below is one of our completed sides of our dragon. It turned out awesome!
We had to cut the streamers for the fire in the mouth of our dragon!
When we showed the class the completed head of the dragon they were so proud!
We practiced our dragon dance in the hallway and discussed how to hold it so that it wouldn't fall over. Check out below the pictures of our amazing completed dragon!
In the group that chose to retell the story of the zodiac, they all made puppets for each of the 12 zodiac animals. We found a video that showed how and why they named each year after which animal so during the video they are going to act it out. Each child chose one animal to draw and we found step by step instructions on how to draw each one.
All of the students did such a great job and the puppets turned out wonderful!
The year of the horse group made horse masks and cork horses.
These turned out awesome as well!
The drum group made drums out of paper plates, dowel rods, string, beads, and decorated it with construction paper.
They look great!
The fireworks group each individually created a firework painting, and a group firework out of paper towel rolls which turned out awesome as well!
The food group made a list of the food that they eat during the New Year celebration. We found pictures of them online for our poster and wrote down what each food means to them. Fried rice means friendship, pork means money, duck means happiness, fish means good luck, noodles mean a long life, dumplings mean happy family, the tray of togetherness has 8 sweet foods that bring a sweet new year, and they also eat Nian Goa- New Years cakes.
For our holidays around the world, the students each got a passport. They wrote their name, age, hair color, and eye color in order to signify that it is theirs. Each country that we "travel" to and learn about their holiday celebration, we will get a stamp on that page of our passport.
The first country we traveled to was France. We learned about their holiday celebrations, Papa Noel, the Yule Log, and Ivy decorations. The students were excited to "fly" to a different country and enjoyed learning about France's holiday celebrations.
The next country we traveled to was Mexico. We learned about their holiday celebrations, poinsettia flower decorations, pinatas, maracas, and different Spanish names for Christmas words and phrases.
We can't wait for the other classes to come to our class on Monday to hear about the Chinese holiday traditions we have learned about and our projects we have been working so hard on! Braydon got inspired by our Chinese New Year study while in the engineering area and used the materials to create chopsticks. We also worked on our purple color mosaic.
The high school national honor society students came to our class to do a math lesson with us. They read a story to the class and then the students had to sort the correct number of skittles on the matching plates.
Then they colored a winter picture while socializing with the high school students. The students were excited to work with and talk to the students.
We are looking forward to finishing our holidays around the world study this week! I will be sending out an email sometime this week with details about sharing our presentations with you the week we come back from break.
Have a great week!
Mrs. Brittany Garrabrant
No comments:
Post a Comment