Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Polar Express

You must head over right now to get this FABULOUS  Polar Express Unit


I love love the Polar Express.  I set up our "train" in a storage closet and we listen to the recording. It is dark and a little bit cold in there, so it is perfect for this activity.


In addition to a bell taped under their chairs, I also make them a ticket. I have a parent volunteer make hot chocolate while we are gone. The children are amazed! :)



Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Hmong New Year/Thanksgiving

One of our rotations was to make egg rolls. We read this poem:

 Here is a first grade teacher showing us the yummy filling.
 We practiced with felt wrappers.  We pointed one corner to our belly buttons.
 We added some pretend filling and folded one point to the center.
 Then we folded another corner in.
 Now here is our envelop and begin to roll.
 And roll
 And at the top, we put pretend egg whites to seal it.
 Now we have the real wrapper.
 We get to add filling.
 Roll.
 Fry (teacher does this)
 Another station, we listened to this book. Each time we hear, Nine-In-One we growl.
 We began our story cloths.  We color them in and then make a border.
 Another station we had was pumpkin pie. I am loving the  Classic Pampered Chef tool!
 Here is the filling with pumpkin, pudding, and spices. All of the students got to smell all of the spices.
 Here is our recipe.
After discussing that we were ALL humans we went off to our groups. One of the stops was listening to the story Nine in One. Everytime we heard "Nine in One" we growled "grr grr"
Today we were handing out  name tags that had Hmong names on for all of the first graders. A nametag was handed to a young lady and she said," We aren't Hmong we want to be humans." First grader said to us after we changed our names to Hmong names. Today we are learning about Hmong New Year and Thanksgiving. We are having 4 stations. Making egg rolls, games, pumpkin pie and storycloths.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Art Museum trip


The k-2 children went to our local art museum and made these elephants:





Thanksgiving

With Thanksgiving quickly approaching, I created this little activity.
 I  created paperwork for the students to write our theme words for this unit.

I printed these icons out and wrote our theme words on sentence strips.  The children write the theme words on the line. I used Pilgrim girl, Pilgrim boy, Native girl, Native boy, turkey, corn, scarecrow.