March 1st Week Part A

 March 4 - Mardi Gras

Poor little frog, he got left on the calming chair over the weekend. First thing we did was let him get off the calming chair (he was very calm) and join his friends.

To learn the topic of the day we did something that we have never done before. We played Hangman. I placed all the letters of the alphabet (plus extras for duplicate letters in the words) on a word strip holder.

 On a white board I drew the hang man stand and the order that the students were to draw the stick man when they guessed a wrong letter.

When they chose a correct letter I would tell them where the letter would go. The white rectangles indicated where the letters would go. We worked on ordinal numbers, for example one student chose the letter"A" and I told her that the letter "A" was the second letter in the top word and the third letter in the bottom word.

If they chose a letter that was not it our words, those letters were placed in the green word strip holder.  The student

 then got to draw a part of the stick figure onto the hang man stand. As it turned out they got really excited when they chose the wrong letter, because they got to draw more on the man.

 

This is what our person looked like before we guessed the last correct letter and learned our mystery words. The words were "Mardi Gras". We had a short discussion about Mardi Gras. We learned that a part of the celebration was to have a parade. In the parade there were floats, and people on the floats threw out coins, called doubloon coins and beaded necklaces. So we used the car we created and made it our float (just without the decorations)

 

 and we threw coins and necklaces out to the imaginary crowds as we listened to jazz music.

To keep in the spirit of fun we found that a Mardi Gras jester had hidden our snack and placed this card by our snack dishes. He left us clues that led us to other clues, some of these clues were easy to figure out and others were not. We thought the clue through, followed the six clues and were led to ...

the bag where our snack was hiding. The bag had been hiding in plain sight (right next to the teacher's seat) all morning and no one had noticed it.

Our snack helped us review some of the fun parts of Mardi Gras. It consisted of float wheels (Honeycomb cereal), the baby (yellow/pink marshmallows from generic cereal), doubloons (green & yellow M&Ms, and purple marshmallows), people (the anchor shaped cereal), and beads (the pretzel squares), and candy (Craisins).

We added apple curls and milk to make the snack a bit healthier.

 The weather was very cold so the students had inside free play for a while. During the free play they decided that our hang man was cold without clothes so they took turns adding clothes to her.

We took time to learn about the different colors of Mardi Gras and their meaning. Green is for faith, purple is for justice, and gold is for power. We learned that Fat Tuesday is the day for indulging in all the rich foods you want the day before Ash Wednesday, which is the official start of Lent (40 days of giving up something before Easter).  We played a cute game "King Cake Game".

We worked in our math journals on our March calendar activities. [I can not find the source for this activity.] I had pasted the calendar on both the top and bottom of the journal (first time) and found that it was very difficult for the students to write on the top page (made a mental note to not do it that way again no matter how much paper it might save).

 We also practiced our cutting skills as we did a couple of worksheets with a Mardi Gras theme. The one above was a freebie I found on Teachers Pay Teachers by Teresa Saraiva de Carvalho.

 This worksheet helped with word identification, cutting, and writing skills (we are focusing on writing the letters correctly as we trace over the dots). It was was also a Teachers Pay Teachers freebie by Limars Stars.

Homework for the day was to make our own toilet paper jester, King cake game, and a Mardi Gras mini book I created.