Chinese New Year!

What a busy time of year! This week our class learnt about two celebrations, Chinese New Year and Shrove Tuesday (Pancake Day). As a part of the new Australian Curriculum, we are looking at all different celebrations throughout the year, it just so happens that two are in this week!

Over the weekend, I made a trip to China Town and got a few bits and pieces from the Chinese grocery shop for the New Year celebrations in our class... it was absolutely packed! China town is such a fun place to be this time of year, so much colour, so many decorations, such as festive atmosphere!

Anyway, back to my class :)....

I set up structured play sessions with a Chinese New Year focus...I took pics of the different stations, but I left my camera at school so I'll need to post them later :)

Here's an overview of the stations...

We rotated the stations over a couple of days, which seemed to work well. They had about 25ish minutes at each station, but with pack up and change over it took the whole afternoon! It was so gorgeous to watch the kids on the New Years Feast Station! They all sat around the table and cooked and served each other food, while trying to use the chop sticks to eat 'noodles' (cut pieces of thick cord). I was so impressed with their turn taking!

For Maths, we read the story about the the Chinese Zodiac by Gabrielle Wang and talked about the twelve animals of the Zodiac. We discovered that most of the class were born in the Year of the Rat, with a couple being born in the Year of the Pig (...and I was born in the Year of the Horse!)

The kids then all made pattern snakes to celebrate the Year of the Snake.

First we talked about patterns....

....and we made our snakes (most did a really great job of patterning - I was quite impressed!). They LOVED adding the googly eyes (I got these from Big W... so much cheaper than the ones in the school-supply catalogue!)

We also counted how long our snakes were, which was an eye opener... there a few kiddos who I'll need to work on their one-to-one number correlation and Trusting the Count - it's given me some ideas of what we need to focus on in the coming weeks!

Here's a copy of the snake heads and the writing card that went with it, if you'd like to use this with your class :)

I hope you had a lovely week with your classes... I'd love to hear of any Chinese New Year activities that you did :)

Pancake Day

I thought I'd write a quick post to share a little Maths activity that we used for Pancake Day (Shrove Tuesday). I know.... not so useful for this year, but I thought I'd share it in case you'd like to keep it for next year :) I need to get better at posting early so that I'm not sharing things after the fact :)

There are two sheets so that you can differentiate the activity for the kiddos in you class, using the same equipment. I'm a  big fan of differentiating using similar activities, as I think its easier and more effective for everyone involved! It means I'm not setting up too many different activities/using heaps of resources, but most importantly, I don't need to have rigid groups. We start our lessons with whole group work on the floor, and if we're all doing similar tasks, it's easy to swap kids between activities depending on how they go in the whole group work, or how they go when they start the activity.

Anyway, back to the activities....

The first page is for practicing writing and representing numbers to 10. Each child just needs a die/spinner (we use 0 - 9 dice) and a copy of the worksheet. They simply roll the die and then draw that number of strawberries on the pancake (or they could do banana pieces/choc chips etc... whatever topping they like) and write the numeral in the box below.

The second sheet is useful for practicing decomposing numbers. Just get your kids to roll the dice and write the number in the squiggly box. They then take that number of counters/blocks ('strawberries') and share them between the two pancakes. They can then draw how many strawberries on each side and write the numerals in the boxes below.

If you have any kids that are up to it, you could also ask them to write an equation for each.

If you'd like a copy, you can download it here

I hope you and your class are having a great week :)