Five for February

So for the first time this year, I am joining in a link up! And I'm picking Doodle Bugs' Five for Friday.

1

I started the term with a couple of weeks on Space and the result of a Maths craftivity making rockets out of 2D shapes and some experimentation with marbling inks and their effects to make planets, was this display.

2

As part of learning about Chinese New Year, we read the story 'The Great Race' and made a small world version for the children to use to retell the story. Though if I'm honest they most just took the rat around the classroom...

3

In the Messy Play area, we had cooked noodles and various tongs and chopsticks to experiment with. Only one child tried to eat it so I consider it a success!

4

This idea was part of the parent activity afternoon we had, where the parent reps from all the classes organised games and crafts for the children to do. Unfortunately I forgot to take photos of the finished firework pictures.

5

The excitement of this term is the introduction of some letters to begin learning to write our names. Look at this beautiful curly caterpillar! 

Throwback - Chinese New Year

Chinese New Year is very early this year, meaning that we have an extremely short half-term (3 weeks!) followed by a rather long 7 weeks until Easter. Still the Year of the Rooster will be properly celebrated with some old favourites and new ideas (adapted to my slightly younger age-group). To kick-start your ideas here is a throwback post to last year...

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Original post - 5th February 2016

A CNY-themed Five for Friday link-up today. Why not head over to DoodleBugs and see what everyone else has been up to this week?

1

Chinese New Year is a big big deal where I currently teach and the school is having a CNY rotation of activities organised by the parents, so I am actually scaling back what I would normally do so as not to take away from their efforts.

My posts from previous years about CNY ideas can be found:
here
and here

I also have a freebie on offer here.

2

I needed a really simple card as with a really tight timetable, unfortunately I didn't have time to do anything overly complicated. This year is the year of the monkey, so I adapted an idea from Adele Jeunette.

3

We made a wishing tree display as a writing focus, using the sentence starter 'I wish' to encourage some use of the recently learnt digraphs! Chinese people have orange trees for luck and prosperity and sometimes write wishes on them. There were some incredibly aspirational wishes ("I wish for diamonds"... please share with your teacher if you find some!) but also some very thoughtful ones.

4

My teaching assistant is a whiz at creative activities and she helped the children to make these beautiful blown ink and finger painted cherry blossom pictures.

5

Chinese New Year wouldn't be complete without plenty of themed books to share with the children. Click on the books for the links to Amazon.

 

 

CNY 2016

A CNY-themed Five for Friday link-up today. Why not head over to DoodleBugs and see what everyone else has been up to this week?

1

Chinese New Year is a big big deal where I currently teach and the school is having a CNY rotation of activities organised by the parents, so I am actually scaling back what I would normally do so as not to take away from their efforts.

My posts from previous years about CNY ideas can be found:
here
and here

I also have a freebie on offer here.

2

I needed a really simple card as with a really tight timetable, unfortunately I didn't have time to do anything overly complicated. This year is the year of the monkey, so I adapted an idea from Adele Jeunette.

3

We made a wishing tree display as a writing focus, using the sentence starter 'I wish' to encourage some use of the recently learnt digraphs! Chinese people have orange trees for luck and prosperity and sometimes write wishes on them. There were some incredibly aspirational wishes ("I wish for diamonds"... please share with your teacher if you find some!) but also some very thoughtful ones.

4

My teaching assistant is a whiz at creative activities and she helped the children to make these beautiful blown ink and finger painted cherry blossom pictures.

5

Chinese New Year wouldn't be complete without plenty of themed books to share with the children. Click on the books for the links to Amazon.

 

 

2015 The Year in Review

How is it the start of another year already? Time flies (especially when you manage to post as infrequently as I do!!) Today I am joining Mrs Beattie's Classroom for a review of 2015.

I don't have a top 10 blog posts, because let's be honest, I only posted 20 times in total last year. Which compared to 84 in 2014, really seems quite pathetic! My top viewed post though was CNY Freebie where I shared some ideas and resources for the Chinese New Year festival (coming up on February 8th 2016), the freebie is still available should you wish to use it this year! 

The biggest blogging milestone was reaching 100 posts in April, something that seemed a very distant goal when I started blogging just over 2 years ago (incidentally I missed my 2 year blogiversary back in November). It was of course a Currently, my most prolific link up party. 

I am frankly amazed that I have any followers left after the shocking irregularity of blog posts in 2015, but my page views are slowly increasing, I hope to reach 10,000 in January 2016! Again, another number that seemed impossibly far away when I started. 

I do have blogging goals for 2016, starting with a minimum of 2 blog posts a month. I also need to get back into creating things for TpT as I find it so useful in my teaching practice that I want to share my own resources more. 

This review has been rather short, however that is probably an accurate reflection of my blogging achievements in 2015! If you have more to say, please head over to Mrs Beattie's Classroom and link up! 

CNY Freebie

Now that is a much more exciting blog post title than my previous one!!

With Chinese New Year coming up (February 19th 2015) I thought I would gather together a few more ideas to help celebrate and teach this fabulous festival in your classroom.

Last Friday, my class made the some goldfish suncatchers as decorations for our classroom as goldfish (and pineapples!) are commonly found in decorations due to their colour being cl'ose to gold. If you are interested in making them, check out my How to... tutorial.

A favourite (and fairly easy chorus at least) song to sing at this time of year is 'Gong xi gong xi'. Why not try and learn it with your class? As an aside, the youtube channel the below video is from has several videos that might be useful.

For even more ideas read my post from last year Gong Xi Fa Chai (early).

Click on the images below or visit my TpT store here to grab a copy of this simple roll and read game. It is currently in my Challenge Area as a themed bit of reading practice!

Gong Xi Fa Chai!

 p.s. Thank you to my lovely commenters on my previous post, you really cheered me up!

Display mania

This is going to be a picture heavy post! Thought I would show you a few of my favourite displays I've recently had up in my classroom. And since I've chosen 5, that gives me the perfect excuse to link up with Doodle Bugs for the weekly Five for Friday!

1

Chinese New Year - showcasing some of their work about the celebration.

2

Birthdays - this is my favourite and goes up in every class I've ever had.

3

Homes - our current History topic.

4

Golden Time - not one I've made myself (from Twinkl), but currently very effective behaviour management for my littlies!

5

And of course my washing line that has had Christmas wreaths, reindeer antlers, New Year Resolutions, Chinese New Year decorations, holiday paintings and whatever else I randomly hang up!

    

How to... make goldfish sun catchers

Thought I would write a How to for my goldfish that I made for Chinese New Year. They are considered lucky at this time of year especially due to their association with abundance of gold.

Goldfish Sun Catchers

You will need:

• sticky back plastic
• orange/yellow tissue paper squares
• permanent marker
• scissors
• goldfish colouring or outline

What to do:

1. Print out a simple goldfish colouring or outline (mine was from Activity Village) and blue-tak a piece of sticky back plastic over the top, shiny side up.

2. Using a black permanent marker, trace over the lines of the drawing.

3. Peel off the stick back plastic and cover the drawing with small pieces of tissue paper. I used a combination of yellow and orange. Allow the pieces to overlap slightly.

4. Cut out the goldfish. (You can cover the tissue paper with a second piece of sticky back plastic, however, I chose to leave it open since that side could face the window).

5. Display in the window.