Five for Friday

Now that this crazy week has been over (school going through quality review, oratorical rehearsal, Lunar New Year celebration and parade) hopefully I can get back to my regular blogging schedule starting....now! Today's Friday so it's time for Five for Friday!

Unfortunately, I haven't remembered to take many pictures from this week besides today during our Lunar New Year lessons and celebrations. So most of the pictures will be from that.

1. My one and only non-Lunar New Year related picture. Monday was a holiday so no school! Which means vacation time! Went to the Charles Schulz museum in Santa Rosa with the boyfriend during our Valentine's weekend getaway. You can read more about it here.

2. We started making our snake crafts for our Lunar New Year parade last week by covering toilet paper tubes with tissue paper squares. We finished them this week by putting them together and adding the eyes and tongues. After school, I added the popsicles sticks in so that they became snake puppets. They were so cool looking!

3. Friday was all about Lunar New Year so I had a little fun and taught my kids how to write and count from 1 to 10 in Chinese. They were surprisingly fast at learning the pronunciation and did a very good job!

4. Another activity for Friday...chopstick math! Pick up as many items as you can using ONLY chopsticks in two minutes. Then, count the numbers, represent with tally marks, order them from least to greatest, and show place value. Some of the kids have never used chopsticks before so they came up with some creative ways to pick things up. :)

5. Ended the day and week with our school Lunar New Year parade. I was in charge of organizing the parade this year. I heard from the other parents that we used to have lion dancers come and perform at our parade (we didn't last year) so I went searching for lion dance groups. Contacted three in the local area and didn't get a response. Decided to try a group that's a little farther away and finally got a response! I'm glad we were able to make it work out. The kids LOVED the performance. Hopefully we can keep this going every year!

Okay...almost done with this month because the craziness is not over yet!!! What's happening next week: school oratorical event, math benchmark, Read Across America. The fun just never stops! Don't forget to link up Doodle Bugs Teaching for your Five for Friday post!