Happy New Year!

No, this post isn't late, today was the start of the new year, at least according to the Chinese calendar. We had a wonderful father who was interested in helping his daughter share some Chinese new year traditions with the class. He donated a workbook and some beautiful decorations for the week so we could tell the children a little bit about how the holiday was celebrated.

Best of all though, he and his daughter worked together to fill some red bags with the traditional orange and 'good luck' envelope for each of her classmates. The little girl was so excited and couldn't wait to hand out the gifts to her classmates! I have to say the funniest part was that we allowed her to pass them out (since she had made them after all!) and she would wait patiently for the child to say "thank you" before going to get the bag for the next child. Not a bad way to help enforce some good manners!

We also put out coloring sheets for the children, with markers even! They were over the moon with excitement about that. I'm not sure how much they all took in about the holiday, but they definitely got the feel that it was a special day. The older children were very interested in learning which zodiac animal was theirs, though they were a little confused about the fact that the animals where for an entire year, rather than a single month.

My favorite part of the day though was something that hadn't been planned. The temperature was hovering just at the 'too cold to go outside for recess' mark and myself and the other teacher finally gave in to not going outside. I'll admit it, we were tired of spending about half an hour getting the children to pack up their lunches and get dressed to go outside. Yeah, we wimped out, but I promise I made it worthwhile for the children!

Thinking about what little group activity we would do at the end of free time a light bulb went off. (Warning: slight smugness and ego boosting ahead!) While keeping one eye on the playing children I pulled off a decent 'lion' mask out of leftover cardboard, construction paper and paper towel tubes. Several of the children watched the process and with some coaxing did guess that I was making a lion for Chinese new year, but they weren't quite sure for what.

When all the toys were picked up I introduced the mask to all the children, and told them about the lion constumes in new years parades that had multiple people in them. At this point some of the older children were catching on to my idea and were already bouncing in their spots and raising their hands to be the first ones to try it out. I called up one of the oldest to be the lion head, showed him how to hold the two pieces and then called up two other children to help make up the body of the lion. one brown sheet and viola! We had a lion costume!

They had a blast pretending to be in a parade. I put on some music (not very parade appropriate music but the children didn't care) and they wiggled around the line on the tile area. The others thought this was pretty cool too and I had more eager volunteers than I could handle to take the next spin the lion costume.

Not too shabby an activity for something put together in about 10 minutes, plus the added bonus of fitting in to the theme of the day!

The week we played inside

Ok, so it hasn't been a week yet, but it's not looking promising. We have a policy of not letting the children out for recess when it's 0 degrees out, including wind chill. Well this week it's been close to zero, actual temperature. Brrr!! So we've been inside and have yet to make tracks in our wonderfully snowed in yard.

The kids haven't been complaining, though they have been looking longingly out the window. Instead we've played with the parachute, done a lot of Simon says and just played with some toys in general. The kids are really in to building with these cardboard bricks we have. They're about a foot long and there's enough that they can actually build a pretty decent fort. It's funny though because there's almost as much squabbling over who gets to put the bricks away as to who gets to play with them in the first place. Don't ask me why, maybe they're fun to carry or something?

Anyways, today though the apparent big hit was limbo. I turned on some music, held a pole for them to walk under and the hilarity ensued. Children crawled under the pole, they belly slid, they crab walked, they wriggled and giggled and had just a great time. Oh, and nobody got stepped on either, yes! The best part though was right after when I lined up the older children to go back to the classroom and as they walked out they were all still dancing a little bit and saying 'thank you'! A pretty awesome end to what might have been a stuffy, boring indoor recess.

Except now I have to top that tomorrow...hmm....

The play yard the children are just itching to get out and play in.
Now it it would only warm up enough to go outside!