Remember I am taking a course on East Asia. As part of the class, I have to do a lesson plan for China, Korea and Japan. When I found out that the Chinese New Year didn't happen until this week of February, I decided we'd do a two week literacy unit on China. Each day students would read both fiction and non-fiction books about China, that would culminate in a New Year celebration. Since it is the the Year of the Snake, we also studied and did informative posters about snakes. Several parents contributed noodles, rice, egg drop soup, chopsticks, fortune cookies, green tea, potstickers and wontons to add to our afternoon.
A few students had still had coins from our American Revolution Patriot Games. Each of them received a traditional red envelope with a few more coins for the celebration.
I give away a lot of little prizes throughout the year and often end up with a few of several different things. I decided this was a good time for spring cleaning.
My wonderful instructional assistant was the Chinese Market Merchant and they had to bargain with her for their goods.
Students practiced calligraphy writing a New Year proverb.
Here we integrated more science, sketching our bulb in our journals and noting the growth. One third of the bulbs were planted in dirt, one third in rocks, and one with flattened glass marbles. We will chart the growth of our Paper Whites ( a Chinese good luck symbol) through the coming weeks.
We created puppet dragons and hats.
Lastly, time to eat all the good food, with chopsticks of course. Very entertaining.
It was a fun study.
Happy Chinese New Year to you!
Happy Chinese New Year to you, too! Once again you have done an amazing job of making education fun. Amara and I are going to have to make those dragons!
ReplyDeleteYou are a good teacher. I imagine that these lessons will stay with them all their lives and go a long way to multi-cultural understanding. I wish our school did something like this.
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