Saturday, February 6, 2010

Chinese New Year

We did Chinese New Year early since I want to spend next week making Valentine's cards and gifts for the grandparents. 

We started out watching a Ni Hao Ki Lan video on Chinese New Year celebrations.  Then we read a couple of books: Dragon Parade by Steven A. Chin and Chin Chiang & the Dragon's Dance by Ian Wallace.  We discussed the various things mentioned in the stories like: lion statues at entrances for good luck, red is a lucky color, firecrackers to scare away evil spirits.

We read The Story of the Chinese Zodiac from http://www.activityvillage.co.uk/ and made a simple wreath with printouts of the zodiac animals from http://www.dltk-kids.com/.








We did a magnet page from Making Learning Fun. I don't do these pages using magnets since Vicki is still putting things in her mouth.  We usually glue on pompoms or use bingo markers.  This time we used small foam shapes that we glued on.  The kids really like gluing and it is good for motor skills and hand strength since we use the big bottles of glue and they have to squeeze pretty hard to get the glue out.  I'm thinking of getting a 3/4" hole punch from the craft store so I can punch holes from the huge variety of scrapbook papers I have, to use for these pages.  Making Learning Fun has them for a huge variety of themes often incorporating numbers and letters as well.  The page we did this time was D is for Dragon to fit in with our Chinese New Year theme.  The picture is of Georgie's dragon but Vicki is also very good at putting the shapes on the circles provided.

We did a coloring page from http://www.dltk-kids.com/.  Usually the kids don't like coloring and just scribble a few lines and stop but Georgie enjoyed this one.  This is the first time I've seen him color in a full picture, much less neatly and within the lines. 


We made a dragon toy following directions from Enchanted Learning with some slight modification.  The kids had a lot of fun painting the pieces.  First they had to hold the heads up like masks and roar like dragons.



After they dried, we put the pieces together into our dragons and then had our very own dragon parade.






We are still doing our MEP math program but Georgie is obsessed with addition and constantly asking what two numbers added together equal.  So, I decided to start doing some addition with him starting at the beginning with +0, just to make sure of what he knows.  He easily did all the +0 facts so we will do +1 next week as well as continuing with greater than and less than using MEP.

We're also continuing with Progressive Phonics and a variety of reading games.  We completed the -at words and are doing -ad words.  We're moving pretty slow with this since we don't do it every day and Georgie gets fidgety fast.   I did keep track of the words Georgie is able to read so far without help: at, bat, cat, hat, flat, fat, mat, pat, rat, sat, bad, dad, had, lad, mad, pad, sad, a, and, big, blue, can, I, is, little, look, me, my, not, play, red, said, the, three, to, two, yellow, you, am, are, at, but, he, like, on, so, that, they, too, was, what, with, as, very, ball, day, duck, eye, pink, had, lot.

Next week we're going to be doing a lot of crafts for Valentine's Day.

No comments:

Post a Comment