Sunday, February 27, 2011

The Great Wall of China










The children are fascinated with the Chinese culture. The idea that adults ride their bicycles to work and to get around the cities. The children attend school on Saturdays to learn calligraphy. The calligraphy is used to create characters. Each character represents a phrase or word instead of the way we string letters of our alphabet together to create a word (we practice daily). They use chopsticks instead of knives, forks and spoons. WOW! China is the only place Panda bears can be found living naturally.
And then there's that Great Wall of China. This is aways what facinates young children the most. It is hard to imagine the time, energy and cooperation it took to build this amazing sturcture. So the children always use a variety of building materials to try and duplicate this sturcture.

The 100th Day of School


It's certainly hard to believe that we have finally completed 100 days of school, especially after all our snow days. Anyway, the 100th day was filled with lots of excitement. We read several books about the 100th day but, Miss Bindergatren Celebrates 100 Days was the favorite. After reading that the children had to write about collecting or eating 100 things. Interesting ideas! The children also shared their wonderful collections with their classmates. We all enjoyed that very much! We had guessing games using white stones, seaglass and Jingle shells. We had to guess which jars had 100 items in it. We even stumped the other adult teachers. Estimation can be very tricky. Then we had a very fun and interesting scavenger hunt that included finding 100 buttons (each individually numbered) that were hidden around our classroom. Each child was sent out to find around six buttons and then they had to match the numbered button on our 100 number grid. We had a great day celebrating to number 100. How fun!!