The Year of the Dragon

This week we were treated to a really neat story about how the animals were chosen for Chinese New Year.  Monday was the first day of the Chinese New Year.  My morning teaching partner, Mrs. Andaloro, spent a couple years living in China.  She has so many wonderful stories about her time there.  She did a week long unit about the Chinese New Year with her class and offered to share the story of the animals with our class.  

All the children got to play a part in re-enacting the story as she read it to us.  They all got to wear an animal sign necklace.  She explained how the Emperor (King played the Emperor) designed a race for the animals.  The first 12 to cross the river and reach the shore will be named for each year.  

Not everyone was chosen to be an animal.  The rest of our boys were the river.  Their job was to shake the shower curtain river, to make it look like it had waves.  Can you see Mara laying down by the river?  She played the cat who fell asleep and didn't get to cross the river in time to be named one of the years.

Thanks Mrs. Andaloro!  We had a lot of fun learning about chinese New Year.  

Your class made a great audience for our performance!

To top it off, Mrs. Mathiesen taught the kids a perfect lesson this week in art.  

Chinese dragons puppets!

In keeping with an artsy theme, we ended the week with a really cool assembly.

Our incredible PTO booked the cartoonist, Mark Kistler to teach the lucky kids at Green-Fields how to draw in 3-D.  It was a hands-on assembly, in that every kid (and teacher) got to draw along with Mark as he taught us how to create funny pictures step by step.

Mark Kistler drew his cartoons on the overhead projector 

as we all followed along in the audience.

Andrew and Chase laughing at Mr. Kistler's jokes!  I don't know if your kinder came home and told you about how funny this guy was; but he was extremely silly and had Andrew cracking up the entire time!!

Oh how I adore the infectious laugh of a kindergartener!

I was thoroughly impressed with how engaged the students were for the hour long assembly.

Mark was able to keep the attention of 3rd and 4th graders and kindlers alike...not an easy task!

Mr. Cohen drew some pictures too!  

Excuse my blurry photo.......

I zoomed in to the back of the auditorium with my iPhone to sneak a picture of the Boss!

If you haven't checked it out already, Mr. Kistler invited the kids to visit his website to watch online video lessons for drawing other 3-D pictures.  Pretty cool!

http://www.draw3d.com

Mystery Readers 5 and 6

My apologies to the latest Mystery Readers!

  I haven't been so quick on adding material to our little blog.

I hope you can forgive me!

Mrs. Eastlack came in to surprise Katelyn and the rest of my munchkins 

on Friday, January 13th.

She read one of my all time favorite books, Go Dog, Go! My own kids loved this story when they were little.  Dominic and I have probably read this at least 100 times!  There was a stretch there for a while when Gabe and Avery chose that book over and over again every night for bed!

Katelyn and her mystery mommy!

The following Friday we had, Dominc's mom come in to surprise us.  

She read a really cute book about a bear who leaves home.  

He didn't want to take his long winter nap and went on an adventure instead! 

 Super cute story with beautiful watercolor illustrations.

Such a great audience!

Dom and mom!

Waddling Our Way Into 2012

Happy New Year!  I have certainly waddled slowly back to my blog!  I'm sorry that I dropped out of the blogosphere for a while there.  I really enjoyed the time off with my family over the holidays and right now we are smack in the middle of basketball season!  With two kids each playing on their school team and a travel team, life in the Corino household is pretty crazy!

Upon our return to school in the new year, we started our unit on Penguins.  It has been a lot of fun. We kicked off the unit reading a non-fiction book about Penguins.  We learned a whole lot about where they live (not just in the cold) and how big or small they can be, among many other things.  The kids were really fascinated by the Emperor Penguins and just how large they are.  Four feet high!! 

I saw a really cool idea on another fellow blogger's site to measure the children's height against the actual height of a penguin.  Mrs. Everwine made a crazy cute penguin to hang in the hallway and when our classes joined forces this week, we all had a chance to see how we measured up to the penguin!

Lauren and Evie were the only kiddos in my class that were taller than the penguin!

After we measured ourselves, each student had to choose the correct word to finish their sentence.

  I am shorter than or I am taller than an Emperor Penguin.  

They really loved making snow paint 

to add a super cool detail to their art work this week!

All of our centers are penguin themed to match our unit. 

 At the art center the kids are turning the letter P into a penguin.  

I think our parade of arctic animals turned out pretty cute!

At the math center, Kassidy and Katelyn were matching tally marks

 to the corresponding numbers on the penguin tummies.

At the game center Lauren and Evie were adding up the dots on the dice and

 covering the corresponding numbered iceberg with a cute little penguin!

Next week.......snowmen!