Dragons and Amaryllis flowers 01/27/2012
This week began with the Green Room celebrating the Chinese New Year. Ming Ming's mom, Isha, came in to do a special art project with us. Because it is the year of the dragon she helped the students make dragon hand puppets. With long tails and big mouths the kids had a blast zooming their dragons through the room and were clearly very proud of their creations. Don't forget to check out the pictures page for a few examples of their work. Isha also helped us act out a folk tale which told the story of how the Chinese year's came to be named after certain animals. The children enjoyed taking on the roles of the animals and treasured the headbands which Isha made with their animal symbols.
We also learned to count to 10 in Chinese which has inspired a new class passion - counting to 10 in a variety of languages. At the beginning of the week we discovered we could already do English, Hebrew, Spanish, and French. With Isha's help we added Chinese and then at the end of the week Bella's family taught us Swahili, German, and Kisei. If your family speaks a language that we haven't listed here, we'd love for you to help us learn to count in it!
We spent the rest of the week examining and learning about our new amaryllis bulb. Examining the bulb the children made predictions about what they thought would grow out of such a unique looking specimen. They began learning about the parts of the amaryllis flower, a process which they will continue next week.Though the end of January may seem like an odd time to be learning about growing plants, we are getting ready for the holiday of Tu B'Shevat, which is the holiday of the trees. This year the holiday falls on Wednesday, February 8. Next week we'll begin talking more about trees.
--Hannah and Emily
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