Spanish Lesson

Today we had a few former McKay students come from the High School to teach us a few Spanish words. We learned some color words and animal words.

Then we raced each other to see who could match the colored dots to the Spanish color word.

It was a lot of fun!

Dear Parents,
We would like to invite you to see our Anansi Plays and our animal reports.
We will be presenting the on Thursday, June 4th. Each student will perform one time, see chart below to know when your child’s time will be. Presentations should take about 30 minutes. We hope you can make it.
Cindy Schimel
Billie Parker

Anansi & The Talking Melon – 10:00 am in room 4
Brett, Kinncey, Adisen, Savannah, Lauryn, Kelsey, Dominick, and Mylah

Anansi & The Talking Melon – 12:45 pm in room 4
Elli, Jared, Taylor, Justin, Alex P. Alexandra, Caden, Kendle, Jaden

Anansi & Moss Covered Rock – 1:45 pm in room 4

Tyler, Trevor, Kayla, Blake, Faith, Ashlyn, Samantha, Gabe

Creating Costumes

We got our Anansi play parts last week.

We quickly started memorizing our lines.

It is exciting to be in a play. We can't wait to share it with you.
Here are what some of our costumes look like.

Apple i-touch

We are borrowing a few i touch devices this month and just started using them.

Pretty sure we are hooked. Anyone have money to donate to the fund? ;o)

We are using the Fliq Notes app to send each other messages.

Once we have them all figured out we will be able to use them for spelling, writing, math, and fun.

AR is showing TS how to use it since they are sharing one.

EN concentrating hard.

TS is writing a note to one of us.

GU moved over here so he could type and then surprise send his message.

Want to see what he wrote?

SO just got a note. This is a really fun way to work.

On Thursday we had our Awards Assembly. I asked JD to take a picture of our cooperation winners because he has shown interest in photography and I thought that was neat.

Deborah Hobkins Visit McKay

Giraffe's Can't Dance was a wonderful story which was the whole reason we made these wonderful posters.

We drew two different posses and then chose one to paint.

I framed one and it looks wonderful. We will try to get them home to you in good shape so you can too if you want.

Last Friday we were so lucky to have the opportunity to meet and visit with Deborah Hopkins. She is the amazing author of many of the books we read during our unit on slavery.

Research Project

We have selected our animal that we are going to create a presentation on and now we are researching it. BR is busy looking up information on the laptops in our room.

TS is looking for information in a book.
KC is recording her information by illustrating in her book what she has learned. JD is painting the background for his giraffe we did earlier.
Everyone did such a great job with them, I think you are going to love them.
I framed one and it is getting many compliments.

All Kinds of Fun

We had all kinds of fun today. Mrs. Miltenberger invited us to another round of Bingo For Books.

Then we all got a surprise! The ESD laptops are BACK!

And the day just got better. We got mail from our Pen Pals!

This week we started our animal reports and read a neat story about a giraffe so we drew and painted a giraffe.

Tomorrow we will finish them up and show you.

This afternoon we watched a few short video clips on some special animals that live in Africa. Then we wrote facts on post it notes and placed them by the animal we learned about.

Rudy Rada Visits Africa

Mr. Rada is 91 years old and has been to Africa five times.

He just got back from a recent trip and came to hear what we have learned and to answer some of our questions.

He wore his Masai cloth that the Masai people wear as he told us stories.

He loved going on "game drives" to see all the animals and visiting with all the people.
He had a message for us, and that was that the people in Africa are the same as us. They work, play, and care about family just like us. Here students are visiting with Mr. Rada about individual questions.
We have been very fortunate to have visitors bring bits of Africa to us.

Finding & Making a Toy

Today we did what many African children do. We went out and found things that could be used as a toy. We had walking sticks, wands, music sticks....you name it, we had it.

Some of us even had found things to decorate our toy.
We challenged the kids to look around their yards and see if they can play for a day with something that they find.

Africa Visitor and Ugli

This is Mr. Kaiser who moved to our area three years ago from South Africa where he grew up.

Here he is showing us the flag of South Africa. Each color stands for something but the "y" symbol is what I wasn't aware of. It represents the white people and the black people blending together to make the world a better place to live.

This week we learned about more of the cultures that exist in Africa.

Here we are with our music shakers performing for our second grade friends.
EN and SO with their shakers.

KC coloring her shaker.

We also make necklaces. We rolled paper triangles around a pencil and the strung them on our necklace.

BR making his beads.

We also tried a staple food from Africa. It is called ugli (oo-gaul-ee).

Some of us loved it while others thought one taste was enough.

At another station we used clay to make a map of Africa and the water around it.

At another station we listened to a tale of Anansi the Spider.

Later this month we will be making an Anansi story into a play.

We will invite you in to see it when we know the date.

Cheers to Ugli and all the traditions that occur in the diverse land of Africa.