Sunday, January 27, 2013

Week 20, Gg, 'go', equal halves, and CHINESE NEW YEAR!


Gung Hay Fat Choy!
What a fast and fun week we had!
We began our short week with Dr. Martin Luther King's 
message of equality and peace.

Here are some great books we read:
    The  Alphabet Tree is about letters getting together to make words, 
words getting together to make sentences,
and sentences making an important message:
Peace on Earth!

We made our own land of many colors page...adorable!

Then we voted for which bag to open.
Hmmm...the shiny one looks so pretty.
And it did get ALL the votes.
So we opened it.
But CATFOOD was on the inside!

Too bad, because inside that plain bag
there was yummy beautiful M&M's!
We learned it's not what's on the outside that matters,
it's what on the inside, in our hearts, that counts!
 We did share the M&M's too...but only
after the kiddos noticed that M&M's come in all colors
but the insides where the same!
They are ALL yummy chocolate!

Tuesday's morning challenge was to simply paint the beautiful background for the Land of Many Colors.  
What a nice way to begin the day!

Here our leader is reading the sentence he built for the class.
The kiddos are really liking adjectives! 

Two more lovely family projects....
Our collection for January is complete!

Tuesday afternoon we continued beach themed centers.
Somebody made too many beach-y packets 
but since they are all fun and educational
it is hard to pack them away without solving them!
SOOOOO...we did beach centers both Tuesday and Thursday!
I really did make too many....geez!
 This one is seashell ending sounds.

Here is shovel and pail greater than....

April is our High School helper who will be with us on Monday and Tuesday afternoons.  She helped with the beautiful PEACE doves.

Here is Shark Attach Addition....


 This is a new skill for us...
We had to color cubes to match the fishy numeral.
Our focus was to just say and color 10 with counting each cube individually....we are getting there!


This is a tray of our doves.
We talked about symbols of peace.

This is one professional looking student!

Here we are wrapping up a few more beach themed
morning challenges...
(upside down) fishy sentences....

numeric order

and fish bowls focusing on the relationship
between number words, the digits, and the number they both represent....



LOVE LOVE LOVE these little lucky dragons!


We had our Chinese Noodles on Thursday!
What good cooking fun!
The kids loved the bright red wok similar to one we read about!

And now pics of everyone trying out chopsticks!













Thursday's centers were still beach themed!
Seriously, I love making centers and get carried away apparently!
This one is from Mrs. Pilger...called double spin star words!
Spin the word to write, then spin the color to make it!

Color words are always a focus...Love this one!


Chicka Chicka Boom Boom rhyming was up next!

One of the kiddos favorites....
Treasure Chest Heads/Tails that focused on which is more!





Here is a nice science center...
This one is Living/Nonliving.
We are hoping to design more to go with each unit.

Friday was our 90th day of Kindergarten!
Wow! 

It was also our Chinese New Year 
Switch-a-Roo day!
The kids each received their own lucky envelopes
complete with some good luck dragon coins.


Mrs. Kalmes' kids were good using their chopsticks, too!
At this time we were in Mrs. Pilger's room painting 
Chinese characters...page down for pics!



And here is Mrs. Pilger's kids...
we were creating and learning about pandas!



Oh, Chinese Noodles are so yummy!
The magic ingredient is.....LOVE!
(and dried spinach for just a bit of nutrition!)

Our lucky dragon was ready to be taken down and paraded around the school!

This is our Chinese New Year center..so many things to explore!

Great idea, Malia!

Here is the picture we looked at to create our own
Chinese calligraphy.

Lovely!
Oh, aren't these little guys adorable?

The Dragon Parade begins!

We each held a piece of the dragon.
Our leaders took turns holding the head.
We then went into each classroom, 
wished the students and teachers 
a "Gung Hay Fat Choy",
and continued on our way!




What a fun week!
Here are some of the Chinese New Year books we read:
  

The week of January 28-February 1
Reading: Letter Ff, star word 'and', spacing between words
Math: Ordinal Numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd...etc)
Theme: wrap up Chinese New Year, begin Fitness Fever and other winter themes
Social Studies: Time Long Ago and Today
Science: The Earth's Water

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