Concluding our Lunar New Year Celebrations

This week we continued to build our dragon for our Lunar New Year parade.  As we built our dragon, Lightning challenged us to look at patterns in our dragon with colour and sound.  The students created AB patterns in our dragon with yellow and red streamers.  They also learned that they could create patterns with sound and movement for our parade.  The students created drums and made patterns in sound, used ribbons to create dance patterns.  As we did this we looked at the pattern core, AB, AAB, and ABC patterns.

In studying the colours in our dragon float, the students also continued to learn about primary and secondary colours.  We reviewed how red (magenta), blue (cyan) and yellow were primary colours.  We learned how these three colours could mix together to make the secondary colours.  Students had the opportunity to make the secondary colours with lenses and paint.

This week we also got a message from Felicity the Fairy letting us know that there was a contest going on in Fairyland for the Lunar New Year.  She told us that if the students built dragons with the pattern blocks the images would be printed in The Fairytimes Newspaper.  Students quickly got to work.  After they were done they wrote about their creations and identified which shapes they used.

We ended our week with our dragon parade through the school. The students proudly showed off our dragon through the high school, our elementary school and the preschool.  While doing so they danced and sang our Chinese New Year song.  It was a wonderful event to build community and showcase what we had learned this week.