Celebrating Chinese New Year

Kindergartners enjoyed our New Year festivities last Friday!  

Thanks to everyone who was able to come to our celebration yesterday!  I'd like to give a HUGE thanks (and 谢谢) to the parents who helped organize the celebration: Nasha, Meng, Ardra, Sharon, and many others worked hard to put together a presentation, a snake craft, and fun hongbao for all students to enjoy the New Year. 

Also, all of Glenwood was blown away by the amazing Chinese gate that Minfu Cheng (Alicia's mom) and TingTing Chu (2nd grader Bo Chi's mom) made by hand last week. 

Check out the photos below for great candid shots of our kindergartners celebrating Chinese New Year!

Are you ready to learn about Chinese New Year?

Our kindergartners sure have learned a lot about Chinese New Year...so this week we decided it was time for the students to become the teachers!  Students worked with Mrs. Jiang to plan a class book about Chinese New Year.  Students chose topics to write about, illustrated their topics, and then wrote about their topics in teams. We then decided to present their book using VoiceThread, a digital presentation tool.  This project helped our students study a wide range of Common Core and North Carolina Essential Standards.  Students practiced the following skills (and more!):

Research: learning new facts from text and other sources, synthesizing facts with background knowledge
Informative writing: Stating facts about a topic
Public speaking
Using technology as a communication tool
Cooperating in a team

Now that we've finished, its time to celebrate!  We will be sharing our kindergatrners' presentation with the other kindergarten and first grade classes so they can learn about Chinese New Year too.  And there was one group of people the kindergartners ESPECIALLY hoped could learn about Chinese New Year from them: their parents!

So, without further ado, here is All About Chinese New Year, by your kindergartners!

All About Chinese New Year