Chinese New Year

Gung Hay Fat Choy!  Today our classroom was transformed into the "House of Learn-ING."  We used the Chinese New Year to enhance our learnING.

Our morning work was learning to write the numbers 1-10 in Chinese characters.  Then the students completed a dragon dot to dot written with Chinese numbers.  Students even opened the app Sum Stacker and used Chinese numbers to solve addition puzzles.

We had our kinder buddies over.  We read our little friends a book about Chinese New Year and then helped them make lanterns for luck.

One of the favorite activities of the day was called "New Beginnings."  With this activity students had to pick a word card out of a Chinese takeout box...with chopsticks of course!

Then they read the sentence on the card.  There was a bold word in the sentence.  Students added a prefix to the base word in the sentence to make it true.  For example, "pieces cut before" would be "precut."  The students worked so hard sorting and building new words with prefixes.

The holiday gave us many opportunities to read folktales and nonfiction text surrounding lunar new year.  It was a terrific day in the House of Learn-ING.  Students earned a coin for luck and happiness at the end of the day.  Best to all in this year of the rat.