Chinese New Year

Earlier this week we were very lucky to have one of the parents from our class to come in and teach us all about Chinese New Year. We learned about the Chinese Lunar Calendar vs. the Solar Calendar, the story of the Chinese Zodiac Race, why 2011 is the Year of the Rabbit and traditional Chinese New Year traditions, superstitions and celebrations.

Our guest speaker, Mrs. Chang, also brought us some fun hands-on crafts, lots of authentic artifacts from China and a goodie bag for each student. She showed us a video clip of the Traditional Chinese Lion Dance for the New Year and explained the symbolism, the martial arts and the dancing involved. It is safe to say everyone learned a lot and enjoyed this unique lesson!

The students were horrified when the next day (the first day of Chinese New Year) I came to school accidentally wearing black which according to Chinese culture, symbolizes bad luck! Luckily, I was able to quickly redeem myself because I had bright red polish (red is considered good luck) on my toes. Whew!

I Pledge Allegiance...

...to the flag of the United States of America.

Each week a different class gets a turn to go to the office and recite The Pledge of Allegiance over the intercom for the entire school. This week it was our turn and the students have been very excited!

The Nines

While discussing multiplication recently, the students decided the nines and the twelves tables were the most challenging. Of course we all know the zeros are simple, the ones are a breeze, the tens we could do in our sleep and the elevens couldn't be easier!

We learned a funny little joke for finding the answers to the nines. If your student has not already demonstrated this little anecdote for you, ask for a presentation!

Polyhedrons

100 Days of Math

In honor of the 100th Day of School, I decided to do a special project for math. After learning about polyhedrons - including the tetrahedron, the hexahedron and the octahedron each student received 100 toothpicks and 100 marshmallows. Students were challenged to build assorted geometric solids. We also discussed vertices, angles, edges and faces. As you can probably imagine, students were very eager to participate and had a fantastic time!

Towards the end of the day we were invited to Mrs. Woodard's classroom to peruse the 3rd grade annual 100th Day of School Projects.

 I heard quite a bit of speculation regarding what current 2nd graders plan 

to do next year for their 100th day project! 

 We got to ask the 3rd graders questions about their projects.

Before we left, lo and behold, another Kindergarten class came parading though Mrs. Woodard's room!

 

We Are 100 Days Smarter!

1 - 0 - 0

We had an incredibly fun but busy 100th day of school! Students began the day writing 100 words, number sentences which all equaled 100 and math word problems with the answer $100. We also wrote about what life would be like if we were 100 feet tall, brainstormed how we will look when we are 100 years old and decided what we would choose if we had to eat the same food every day for 100 days in a row. Then each student got the die cut numbers 1 0 0 and had to glue them on a large piece of paper with the intention of transforming the numbers into something new. We got some very creative results!

Later in the day when we were working, our classroom was suddenly filled with Kindergartners parading through celebrating the 100th day.

Veterans of Sonoran Sky eagerly reminisced about when THEY were in the Kindergarten parade and many students were excited to see KG siblings and friends. This was only a portion of our 100th day.... more details to follow...

Weekly Update

This week will surely be incredibly busy, because we have quite a bit to do!

Please remember that this is conference week. If you have not heard from me regarding a confirmed conference time and you would like to meet, please let me know and I will gladly fit you into the schedule. All before and after school enrichment classes are canceled during conference week. Thursday and Friday of this week are early release days, due to conference schedules.

Tuesday we will hit a big milestone - the 100th day of school! I have many fun and exciting activities planned including spelling 100 words, writing 100 sentences, solving 100 math problems, researching with the world was like 100 years ago and lots more! Tuesday will be a special day for us! 

We did not start learning about poetry last week as originally planned, so we will begin that unit this week. The district poetry contest is coming up soon and I know many students are very eager to enter. 

There will only be one spelling list this week and it will contain words from the upcoming WordMasters meet. Students do not need to memorize the definitions as dictionaries are allowed during the meet. However, students tend have more success with analogies if they have a solid understanding of the vocabulary. We will participate in the meet (meet #2) at some point this week.

A good portion of the class has tested out of the Three Minute Multiplication Challenge and many other students are very close! We will continue with that drill for the rest of the quarter.