Thursday, February 19, 2015

Chinese New Year Video and Parade

Here's the video we made for our school assembly! The kids became Chinese New Year experts. I was so impressed by how much they learned about the holiday.

We ended the assembly with our own dragon parade!











Friday, February 13, 2015

Valentine's Day

What a wonderful morning we've had! The Valentine boxes that kids made are so creative and amazing! 

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Hung hay fat Chou

Hung hay fat choy is a greeting you might hear during Chinese New Year. It means means best wishes and congratulations in the new year. 
Today we started creating decorations for the stage for our assembly. Our assembly will be on Thursday morning at 8:05. Children should wear red and orange if possible. 
We are creating many crafts for this event and a movie to teach about Chinese New Year! 
We'd love for you to come and watch our assembly and join in the celebration!
Q works on cutting his lantern.
Marley decorates her lantern.
Wren copies Gung Hay Fat Choy onto her lantern.

Monday, February 9, 2015

Bagel breakfast

Wren surprised us this morning with homemade bagels! What a nice way to start the day- gathered around the table chatting and eating. Thanks Wren for the delicious treat!

Friday, February 6, 2015

100th day

Yesterday was the 100th day of school, but our count was a little off and we celebrated today! Since many students were disappointed about skiing being cancelled, this was a great distraction!
We started by reading a fun book called 100th Day Worries  which gave us a lot of practice counting to 100. Then we decorated and put together these awesome 100th day glasses:









Then we thought about things that we would love 100 of and things we would NOT want 100 of:
We also did some writing about what we would buy with $100. We even did 100 exercises! What a fun day!

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Chinese New Year

One of the district kindergarten curriculum items is  Celebrating Differences and Similarities through a Multi-Cultural Study. The focus question is:

In what ways are children's lives in other parts of the world different from the lives of the children in Vermont?

So, I decided to embark on a study of Chinese New Year with my class. I have always enjoyed studying this holiday with children because of the similarities and fun differences to our own New Year celebrations. There are also wonderful art projects and play based explorations that tie in beautifully with this study.

Yesterday we read The Pet Dragon and I taught the kids how to draw a simple dragon.

We talked about aspects from Chinese culture that were included in the book- that the color red is important, the the buildings look different, there is a Great Wall, and that dragons are important. Today, we retold the story and the children drew their idea of a pet dragon and wrote what they would do with a pet dragon.




Stay tuned for more of our learning about Chinese New Year and the Chinese culture. We will be hosting a school wide assembly to teach others about Chinese New Year. I'll let you know the date and time as soon as it has been decided (most likely the 19th or 20th).

Penguins

On Friday we wrapped up a wonderful unit on penguins.  It must have been incredibly fun and engaging because I cannot find a single photo from the unit! We were all so involved in the learning that was happening, I didn't stop to take pictures! Apologies.
When the unit began, we thought about what we thought we already knew about penguins. Then we wrote down ideas of things we were wondering about penguins. We measured ourselves against different sizes of penguins. We studied the Emperor Penguin especially closely and became experts on this type of penguin. We read Mr. Popper's Penguins and loved the story!
Here are some questions to ask your child about penguins to see how much they have learned:
Do penguins only live in cold places?
What types of nests to penguins build?
What do penguins eat?
What is your favorite type of penguin?
What is the smallest/largest penguin?
How does a father Emperor Penguin take care of the egg?
What animals like to eat penguins?
How do penguins decide that water is safe for swimming?
What are some special features of a penguins body? How do they stay warm?