Gung Hey Fat Choy!

Today was Chinese New Year! We started our day by watching a short video of a family celebrating Chinese New Year. Then we did a venn diagram, comparing and contrasting our New Year to the Chinese New Year. We discussed how they use a lunar calendar so that is why their new year is on a different day. They made their own lunar calendar and figured out which animal they are, most are either the dragon or the snake. Then to top it all off we had fortune cookies and we used chopsticks to eat goldfish. Gung Hey Fat Choy (may prosperity be with you)!

Mrs. Martin

This is our Venn diagram.

Our bulletin board with our lunar calendars. It is the year of the Ox!

Lunar calendar.

Tables three and four with their chopsticks.

Table two having some fun.

Table one enjoying their fish!

Table six, they had a race to see who could eat their fish the fastest only using their chopsticks.

Happy New Year!

Well we're back in full swing. We've been taking benchmarks and doing our middle of the year assessments. We have one more benchmark to take and then we'll be finished until May. I will send home the results when we are finished with everything which will probably be next week. I have no new pictures at this time but hopefully I will soon. Some things to look forward to are our second grade play, our field trip to the Houston Zoo, and Go Texan Day. I hope everyone is have a fantastic new year so far. Keep checking the blog and will post some pictures soon.
Mrs. Martin

Holidays Around the World

This week we are doing Holidays around the World. Each teacher is representing a different country. We will visit each country throughout this week. While we are visiting we will learn about the country and its holiday traditions. We will also make a craft while in each country. Our country is Mexico. I read The Legend of the Poinsettia by Tomie DePoala. Then we each made our own poinsettia. The kids seem to enjoy visiting the other countries, they even have a passport that they made. They must show their passport to each teacher in order to enter each country. We will conclude our Holidays around the World on Friday with Sweden. We will also have our holiday party on Friday, don't forget your book for our book exchange! I hope you all have a wonderful break. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!

Pictures

We learned some Indian symbols.


Working on our tortilla teepees!

Having some Thanksgiving fun!

Working on our tortilla teepees.

We used ads and cut out our favorite Thanksgiving meal then we tried to see how much it would cost by adding up the prices of everything.

Working on Indian word finds.

Happy Turkey Day!

Our Thanksgiving Feast was a hit. We had plenty to eat, thanks to all of our wonderful parents. Thank you to all who donated food, plates, juice, silverware, etc. The kids were very excited about eating in our room. Yesterday and today we worked on our Native American vests and headbands, deer skins, tortilla teepees, and name place cards. We also created some beautiful turkey place mats. Here a few pictures I snapped during our feast. I know some moms took other pictures so as I get those I will post them for all to see. We had fun. Thanks again to all parents who donated items and their time. I couldn't have done it without you!!!

Pump it up

Here we are being a bit silly!

Here are a couple group pictures of most of the kids from our class that attended the Pump it up party. I know that some could not make it and a couple kids left before we were able to take the pictures. We sure did have fun!

Spirit Packs!

Our class was one of the top classes for the donation campaign. We actually raised enough money for our class to get our very own ELMO, which is a very cool piece of technology equipment. We currently have some that our grade level shares but I can't wait until we get our own to keep. We also got to have a Pump-It Up party. Pump-It Up is a place you can go and they have rooms with large blow up obstacle courses, moon walks and a giant blow up slide. Our whole class was invited last Wednesday night and we shared a room with Mrs. Scogin's class. We had a blast. I did the obstacle course so many times I lost count, but I felt it the next morning. :) Also for raising the money we recieved spirit packs from our Kaufman PTO. I took some pictures of the kids that afternoon that we got them. We had just finished a long day of Stanford testing so they were very excited to get their spirit packs. I hope to post some pictures from Pump-It up soon, I'm going to have to ask the moms who took pictures to send them to me, but for now here are the ones with our spirit packs.