Learning About the Chinese New Year

 

Chinese New Year started on February 14th and goes until February 28th. It is a 15-day celebration follows a lunar cycle and ends with a full moon. This year we are celebrating the year of the TIGER. We made animal puppets and speech bubbles to represent the different animals in the Chinese calendar. Your students were either born in the year of the goat (2003) or the year of the monkey (2004). I was born the year of the ox!

We have also made dancing dragons an Chinese fans. We painted the fans with delicate flowers and Chinese characters (letters). Out in the hall we have been workiong all week to create our dragon with different bright colors and materials. We will be making a dragon head for the parade on Friday. We made drums, will use instruments, carry our fans, lanterns, and dragons in our parade.

On Wednesday, our very own Lantrip 5th grader, Jonathon Tran come to speak to our class about his family's Chinese traditions. We can't wait for our celebration on Friday!

Great Olympic Videos!

http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/assetid=481e7266-e705-41c6-b154-4140b4ef319e.html

Follow the torch here:
http://www.vancouver2010.com/more-2010-information/olympic-torch-relay/olympic-torch-relay-interactive-map/

Blogging is back in action!

Thank you for being so patient with me, parents! I will be uploading lots of pictures and videos as we venture into some exciting units.

This week we are starting our Olympics 2010 unit. We will be visiting each country through google maps, investigating the winter Olympic Games sports and athletes, graphing medals, and reading lots of books about the Olympics. Please watch the opening ceremonies this Friday, February 12th at 6:30 on NBC. Each Kinder class has chosen a different country so next week our class will start to cheer on Canada! Join us as we track the amount of medals Canada wins!

There are many activities on the Olympic Committee website: http://www.vancouver2010.com/.

Next week we will be tracking the Olympics AND starting our Chinese New Year Unit! More to come on that! Here is a great website to get a head start learning about the Chinese New Year: http://www.theholidayspot.com/chinese_new_year/.

Finally, Valentine's Day is on Sunday so we will be having a sweet, Valentine exchange on Friday. We will be doing a Valentine writing project, graphing candy hearts, and enjoying our loving classroom. Some kind vocabulary words we are learning are: love, friendship, "excuse me," "please," "thank you," and respect. Help you student think of other kind words so we can add to our kind word chain!

Field Trip to the Houston Arboretum

We Love Trees!
Magnet K-2 took an awesome trip to the Houston Arboretum. Check out some of our pictures and the website: http://www.houstonarboretum.org/. We learned about the different habitats within the park like the pond, in trees, and under logs. We also became track detectives to find which animals leave certain tracks. We found decaying logs, trees that woodpeckers hunted for insects in, and scary, hairy vines that we found out were poison ivy!

Sing this great song with your students to the tune of The Farmer in the Dell:
A Habitat's a Home,
A Habitat's a Home,
Food, water, shelter, space,
A Habitat's a Home!



Make a Smilebox slideshow

Winter Pictures!



Make a Smilebox slideshow