Door Decorations

Ok, this post is about 2 months overdue, but I had to share it before I forgot. Here’s a picture of the door decoration that my kids and I did during our ancient civilizations unit. I was pretty pleased with how it came out considering I put a group of 12 year olds on the project.

And finally, here’s the last door decoration for the school year. My kids came up with the idea to use an interactive facebook and twitter door to say goodbye to classmates, younger students, and teachers. We created fake profile pages here and even tied a pencil to the door so people in the hallway could leave a tweet with their well wishes. We’re proud of how it turned out.

Restaurant Math Project

It’s hard to believe the end of the school year is less than a month away now. This time of year is always met with a mix of feelings, from exhaustion and burnout to excitement and pride. I have the pleasure of teaching the oldest bunch of kids at my school so it always feels doubly emotional. It’s going to be difficult to say goodbye to this group in particular because they’re such a small class and we’ve gotten very close throughout the school year… It’s how I imagine a parent feels when they wake up and realize their baby is all grown up. Kind of.

Anyway, I wanted to end the year with a fun math project, but wasn’t struck with any bright ideas. I searched all of my favorite teaching blogs, pinterest, and even google, but nothing stood out. Eventually I came across this cool restaurant math activity that was a bit below my students’ abilities, but still helpful for introducing real-life math. Doing this activity with my students gave me the idea to have them design their own “restaurants” complete with menus, pricing, and even a 3D design in Google Sketch-up. The kids are SUPER excited about this because they love all things food related.

The project starts with a proposal to me about which type of restaurant they’d like to open (coffee shop, deli, pizza parlor, taco stand, etc.). Once approved, they have to put together some delicious menu items with descriptive language and appropriate pricing. Now, we’re in Vietnam so I let them choose which currency they’d like to use, but this is easily adaptable for any location. In fact, for an added challenge, you could tell students where their restaurant location is and have them work with currency conversions to complete this project. Later, after the menu and pricing is set, the students will make a corresponding worksheet with word problems that relate to their menu. Each student will need to submit 10 problems (addition/subtraction, multiplication/division, discounts/percentages, rounding, and estimation) that classmates will have to solve. Finally, each student will bring in one menu item and a printed copy of their menu to share with the class. This will be our final party of the year, and one that I hope they remember for a long time.

Here’s the slideshow that I made with the project guideline if you’d like to use this as a model in your class. Happy Monday to all my stateside friends!

Here's another helpful site for more restaurant math!

Haiku- Mixed Media Art Journals

Well, we’re a couple weeks into our poetry unit here, and things are going great. We covered the elements of poetry and have now ventures into the thick of it with acrostic, concrete, and haiku poems. I wanted to share our haiku project from today because I was really impressed with their effort on this one.

It’s not every day that your students can grasp a concept like subtlety, and then show you that they GET IT. It is a beautiful thing, my friends. Anyway, so after we learned a little about the history and structure of haikus, we split the class into different seasons and started brainstorming ways to describe nature in those seasons. Then, once we felt like we had enough descriptive words down, they went to work making their own seasonal haikus.

Later for art, we looked at some really great examples of mixed media and art journal pages so they could get a visual of what our goal was, and started exploring with texture, color, and technique. I allowed them to use any medium that we’d worked with this year, including drawing/sketching, painting (watercolor & acrylic), doodling, collage, stenciling, and sponging. I had to keep reminding them that mistakes could be covered, and that layers were what make mixed media so cool. Once they got that, the awesomeness started to emerge… Check out s couple of them below. Have a splendid weekend!

Spring!

Summer!

Winter!

Fall coming soon!

Mother's Day Poems

Happy Friday, everyone! Well, at least for those of us living in Asia. It’s May and the rainy season is upon us once again, which means I’ll be sporting wet shoes and a poncho for the next couple of months. It really makes me miss having a vehicle with doors and a roof, but hey, it’s just water, right?

This weekend is Mother’s Day, and coincidently, we’ve just started our poetry unit, so I thought- what better way celebrate mom than with a beautiful poem? In language arts we’ve been learning about figurative language, specifically similes and metaphors, so we read some poems that use figurative language just to get some ideas. Then, we brainstormed a list of adjectives that we use to describe our moms.

Later for art, we created a watercolor floral border to publish out poems on… I got the idea for this project here. Here’s a few snapshot of our pieces today.

Happy Mom’s Day to all you fierce females out there. Hope you have a great weekend!

Start with watercolor- be sure to leave a space for your poem!

Any color combo will do...

Once it dries, draw over it with a fine-tip permanent marker or fountain pen (0.5mm)

It's up to you how light or dark the flowers.

Add the final draft of your poem.

Voila! Mother's Day Gift, boss status.

Travel Video Project-update

Hey there! If you can’t visit Paris or Greece, why not bring it to you? That was what we decided to do last month with our travel videos. This was a great activity to tie in our unit on geography, but there were so many cross-curricular opportunities here with language arts, technology, and social studies.

I just wanted to post a quick update on the project now that they are up and published. Click here to find the project guideline and rubric.

We’ve been putting the finishing touches on our videos and editing them for publishing. Unfortunately, I’m not a whiz with video editing or iMovie so I wasn’t able to give as much assistance and instruction as I would have liked, but I think we did ok. I was more interested in how they would compile and present their research than anything else, and in that respect, I think they did pretty well. Here are a couple of our videos if you want to check them out.

Here's the example video I created from last summer's trip to Greece.

Nhu's travel video on Espana!!!

Minh Chi's France video.

Back in Time- Class Museum Project

WOW, what a week it has been over here! We’ve just finished up our final unit project on ancient civilizations with a way too big museum exhibit for the entire school. It was a heck of a lot of work, but we’ve received some great feedback from all of our visitors- we even made it onto the school website, so I thought I’d share it in a post here.

For this unit, we’ve been focusing on the ancient Egyptians and their daily lives in class. Additionally, the kiddos chose their own ancient civilizations to research about to create a FULL-BLOWN history museum exhibit. They had to find relevant details about the history and culture of their chosen civilizations and display their findings in the form of a museum exhibit, complete with ancient artifacts. Here are the guidelines that I gave to them weeks ago. Last Wednesday, each class in the school was assigned a time slot and given admission (raffle) tickets to visit our newly remodeled classroom that was transformed into a museum!!!

Here are a few snapshots of our big day… If you have any pointers or want to know more in detail what I did, feel free to leave a comment.

Hope you are surviving what’s left of the school year. 6 more weeks on this end, and the official countdown has begun. Cheers- Happy Friday!

All dressed up and ready to go

All about the Egyptians

Minh Chi reporting live from ancient Rome

Winnie in ancient Greece

Nhu teaching about ancient China