A Busy Afternoon

This afternoon was quite a busy time for Room 20.  We began our afternoon with a special presentation from StarDome.  The StarDome is a program which is basically a portable planetarium.  They set up a large, dome tent in the Gym and inside you look up and see the sky.  It was pretty interesting to hear all the stories and see the constellations.

During the next part of our afternoon, we began building The Great Wall of China in our small groups.  Earlier this week, groups of students went through the design process to plan out how they wanted their wall to look and what materials they would require based upon three criteria:

1)The wall had to be 1 meter long.

2)Only recycled materials could be used for the building materials.

3)It had to look like the Great Wall.

This afternoon, each group received their plan and could come and choose 8 pieces to begin working with.  Once each group had chosen their materials, material choice was opened up.  So far they are looking pretty good.

Chinese Dragon Scrolls

For our latest Art project, we tied it in with our unit on China and made Dragon Scrolls.  

Before we began we learned a little bit about the dragon and the dragon scrolls.  We learned that in Chinese culture, dragons are considered kind and helpful.  They also control bodies of water and ward off evil spirits. 

We also learned that Chinese dragons are often painted with a flaming pearl.  This pearl is what gives them their magical powers.

For our scrolls, we didn't paint, but instead designed them using several examples as our guide, then did our colouring using pencil crayons.

Here are a few examples of some of our finished products.

A Day of Celebrating

Today we celebrated two special occasions.  It was 100th day, which means we have now been at school this year for 100 days, and as Valentine's Day is tomorrow we had our class Valentine's Day party.  The combination made for a busy day.

We began our day by doing some writing centered around 100th day.  We talked about what it would be like to be 100 years old and then brainstormed what we might do, say, and wear.  Students then wrote about themselves at 100.

After lunch we had our 100th day stations.  There were 8 stations total, and students could visit them in any order they wished.  The stations included: a bean bag toss where students had to add points to make 100, a cup stacking station where using a 100 cups they had to make a tower, a station where they rolled a di 100 times and recorded which number was rolled the most, snakes and ladders, ways to make 100 on the whiteboard, a pizza graphing activity where there were 100 toppings on the pizza, a mystery picture, and a station where students filled out questions about being 100 days smarter.  Everyone had a lot of fun.

The rest of our afternoon was dedicated to our Valentine's Day party.  We began by decorating paper bags to use as mailboxes for our Valentines.  Students then exchanged their cards and checked out all their goodies.  It was then time to eat!  We had an abundance of food and drinks this year, and we even had a special treat.  Lily's dad brought everyone slurpees!  We all ate our fill and everyone had a good time.

Chinese Games

Yesterday in Theme Studies we added the last section to our lap book, a game called "Fishing".  Today we went through how to play and got together with a partner to try it out.  It's a game similar to "Go Fish", however it is used with dominoes instead of cards, and players are working from a shared set of dominoes in the middle as opposed to taking them from their opponent.  It took a bit of practice, but we all got the hang of how to play.

Using Chopsticks

In Theme Studies we've been learning all about China.  Yesterday students put together a mini book for their lapbooks on how to use chopsticks.  Today we all got a chance to try them out.  

We used our mini books as a guide to help us understand how to hold the chopsticks, then once we got the hang of it (which was pretty tricky), we practiced using them.  At each table were two cups filled with a variety of objects.  Students moved around the room to see how easy or difficult it was to pick the different objects up.  

By the end, most of us were pretty successful!