Just4Fun

It sure is hard to believe we have been in school 100 days, especially with our snow week. We celebrated being 100 days smarter with a variety of fun learning activities.
We began by cutting out the digits in 100 and turning them into something else…the children created penguins, robots, faces, and lots of other things as well.

Then we had a museum to view everyone’s artwork. Without any prompting, the kids oooed and awwwed over each other’s work. They were full of compliments for their friends. It was such an endearing moment.

We had a great time exercising to 100 next. The kids did 10 activities 10 times to exercise all the way to 100. They were bunny hopping and twirling, stretching and jogging in place.

It was great to see that with a few rules and tips the kids were able to safely and independently move around the room as they wished to all the exercise stations.

Later we had a delicious time making necklaces of 100 fruit loops. The kids did a ton of counting(and eating). Needless to say they were a bit loopy when they were done.

We earned 300 Behavin’ Ravens! That means someone in our class showed safe, respectful, learner behavior 300 different times, certainly something to celebrate! The kids chose to do crafts to celebrate and I of course felt compelled to spice it up. The children have been a teensy bit obsessed with our read aloud book Mummies in the Morning. I thought this celebration would be a good opportunity to teach the kids a little something about ancient Egypt and give them a chance to get a little creative.
We began by watching a video clip that depicted everyday life in ancient Egypt. When I previewed the video I noted the many shirtless men in the video and knew it was time to have our first “let’s-not-judge-other-peoples-way-of-life” talk. In kindergarten this type of talk requires excruciatingly explicit statements such as ” you may not say eeewwww if you see something that seems weird to you. You can think, oh that’s different, instead.” We enjoyed the video with a minimum of “eewws”, as well as many “ooos”, and “awwws”. My personal favorite part was when one child was saying out loud “oh, that’s different” and the person next to them was like “sshhhh, you are supposed to think that, not say it!”
We continued our journey into the ancient world by learning about hieroglyphs. The kids got to type their names in hieroglyphs on the SMART board as well as create scrolls and cartouches with hieroglyphs.

One child even invented her own hieroglyph!

We moved onto learning about pyramids and building our own which required some problem solving on the kid’s part. The vertical requirements of the build stumped them at first as I am sure was the case for the ancient Egyptians as well.

Next we went glam and created our our collar necklaces which turned out super pharaoh-chic!

And I think this pic of the glitter mess sums up the success of our fun celebration.