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Kodomo No Hi

 

We started our celebration of Children's Day on the Japanese national holiday--- May 5th. 

 Next week we will continue our study of Children's Day.  We will learn about some of the traditional activities that happen on Children's Day through reading books and looking at videos/pictures online. 

We will make carp kites. 

On Thursday, we made origami samurai hats.

About a month ago, we all went to computer lab and did some research on Japan.  

We went to Kids Web Japan which is an awesome site for kids. 

In case your child would like to go on at home...

http://web-japan.org/kidsweb/

Happy Birthday, Keely!!!

After getting sick at school on her birthday AND missing our field trip, I thought Keely deserved a special picture with her long awaited cupcakes!!!!

Misc. Pics....

Maia and Jimmy sharing their elapsed time Tortorise & The Hare stories! 

 

 Keely's Share Time.

Pippa's share time--A Kimono!

100th Day of School

How many times can you ......  in 100 seconds?

 Stand up and sit down.

Luis & Christos

Asher

Stavrina's Birthday

Equal Arm Balance Pics

Some more old pictures from our balancing unit....

Balancing Pics...

Here are some old balancing pics.... The kids loved the hands on experiments!

Japanese Suitcase from Children's Museum

The kids were so excited to open up the suitcase. 

Here we are looking at all of the items from Japan!

Each families items were wrapped up in a cloth.

A child's school backpack.

School uniform

Girl's Kimono

Mrs. Melnik tried it on!

Taking a look at the many photos of Japan...

We really learned a lot and it was great to have so many items from Japan.
We can't wait to go on our field trip and see a Japanese house!!

Pennies for Peace

Room 9 is busy at work counting all of the pennies!!

Aidan and Jimmy working together.

Olivia's busy counting

Conor too!

Keely as well :)

Wow!! We collected 47.91!!!

With the book we read "Listen to the Wind"

Awesome Behavior!

I am so very proud of the students of Room 9!  They filled up their jar with 351 blocks!!! How impressive! 


We had a special afternoon together on Friday!  We had a long recess followed by a pizza party.  We had a surprise party for Ms. Ferola's birthday with ice cream sundaes!  Then the kids watched The Mouse and The Motorcycle, the read-aloud that Ms. Ferola read to the class.  We finished the day with popsicles for Luis' birthday!  What a great start to break!! :)

We will start over new again right after break.  Please praise your child for their awesome behavior and remind them to continue to impress us with following the rules and doing such great work. 

I wonder when & what our next "filled-jar" reward will be......

Our Author Study: Patricia Polacco

The start to our Author Study is going great!  We are learning so much about Patricia Polacco.  She has written over 30 books!  I went to the public library and took out 26 of her books!  We have started to read some of her great stories. 
 
We watched a few short clips about Patricia's life.  She was dyslexic as a child and we'll soon out find about  her teacher who helped her in the story Thank You, Mr. Falker.  We learned that her Babushka did "fire-talking" each night.  This is a time when her grandmother shared "family stories" around the fire.  Her grandmother was from the Ukraine and had a thick accent.  She shared these stories to entertain the children since they didn't have a television.  

After each story we read, the kids will do a recap of what they heard.  They are starting to work on their Patricia Polacco treasure box of stories.  We will then make a 'quilt' with stories we have read.

We were lucky to make our own Pysanky Eggs like Patricia did in the story called Chicken Sunday.  We also listened to the story called Rechenka's Eggs which talked about Babushka going to the Easter Festival in Moskva thanks for the beautiful eggs and special gift from Rechenka, the injured goose.

Thank you to Kerry (Zac's Mom) for coming in on Friday and helping the kids decorate their fabulous eggs.  Thanks to Kerry for the pictures as well! 

Check out our comfy day clothes too!!! 

 

Ben in his cool pajamas!

 Jack looks comfy!

 Maia even has on her bathrobe!

Photos!!

I'm so glad that I got back some of the permission slips to put your children's pictures on our blog.  It makes it so much more interesting to read!!!  If you haven't yet, please send back the form.  

I will try to get a picture of each child who sent back the form on to the blog very soon...I know the kids will be excited to see their pictures!!

Hope everyone is having a great day off! :)

Mapping Unit

A few months back, the kids worked in small groups to create maps of the outside of the school. 

                                                       

                                                     Lolita and Stavrina working on a map of the basketball court.

                                                         Aidan and team decided they needed to do
                                                        do laps of the sprinkler park to decide how
                                                        big to draw that area.

                                                    Keely & Benjamin hard at work!!

                                                       Aidan & Charlotte debating....

                                                        Another group busy at work!

Better late than never!!! 

Wishing we could still do outside activities in short sleeves!!!