Have a great weekend everyone! It feels like I only said that yesterday :) Although we only had 2 days of school this week, we kept the kids busy by doing so many activities related to Chinese New Year celebration.
Yesterday, Ibu Lily from grade 3-4 was so generous sharing her expertise. She taught the kids how to count number 1-10 in Chinese as well as how to write them. Now the kids know how to say yi, er, san, si, wu, liu, qi, ba, jiu, shi. As a bonus, the kids were also taught how to sing Twinkle-Twinkle Little Stars in Chinese.
Supporting our language arts and literacy, the kids tried to do a calligraphy writing of their names. Carefully they traced their names using paintbrush and gold paint. Colored sand trays were also available for the kids to either writing their names or even just free drawing. It's great to see how they did that effortlessly. Writing names is an easy peasy task for them.
Look at a bunch of little artists in our class. To cherish Chinese New Year, we painted our very own cherry blossom trees. We started the project by painting the cherry blossom tree branches. The next day, we rolled pink tissue paper into small balls and attached them to the tree branches. We plan to put them all up on our classroom wall after the break.
We played 12 zodiacs matching game this morning. Other than good memory, taking turns was also the skill needed in playing these games. The kids also learned how count by pairs.
We had a terrific Korean morning with Kyung Mee Jung, Junghoon's mum, coming to our class as our guess star. We learned on how Korean also celebrate lunar new year which is known as Sollal. Koreans would love wearing new clothes, playing jegichagi, eating tteokguk, and doing other traditions to celebrate Sollal. We were so lucky that this morning we were able to do some of those traditions. We could see and touch hanbok, korean traditional costume; we learned how to do sebae, greeting salute to the elders; Kyung Mee Jung specially made customized jegi for each of us so we could learn how to play jegichagi; then we learned how to prepare tteokguk, Korean new year soup which is so yummy. Thank you, kamsahamnida Junghoon, Kyung Mee Jung and Shin Sangkyun for sharing Korean wonderful tradition.
Celebrating Chinese New Year won't be complete without having the dragon dance. The kids practiced their fine motor skills by stapling strips of paper into paper chain. Afterwards, they added the dragon head. Right before class dismissal today, we did a little dragon dance parade at our backyard with Ms. Idah and Pak Arif as the music players.
Anyway, have a great long weekend everyone. Happy lunar new year to the Shins and the Gagnes. May this new year bring you prosperity, good luck and good fortune.
