What A Week!

We have been very busy having LOTS of fun in KA! We've been traveling all around the world aboard our magical Polar Express train and learning about holiday traditions. This week was extra special, as we also performed our holiday concert with the JK students, and celebrated achieving our class goal with a Polar Express Pajama Party! It was so great to have all of the kindergarten classes together for a special treat :)

One of our stops was England, where gingerbread cookies come from! We read the Jan Brett story The Gingerbread Baby and had fun creating our own gingerbread boys and girls.

We travelled through customs and had our passports stamped.

Making our very own Gingerbread Babies!

We then travelled to Ukraine, and listened to Jan Brett's adaptation of the traditional Ukrainian folk tale, The Mitten. This was one of our favorites!

Our passports are getting pretty full!

The next stop on our journey was Germany, where we learned about the first Christmas trees! We had a great time decorating our own "trees" ;)

We were worn out after all the fun, so it was the perfect time for us to enjoy a movie and popcorn with our KB and KC friends:

The morning after our Polar Express party, a surprise arrived... from the North Pole! It was an envelope full of bells! The Monkeys are pretty sure our class elf, Rudy, had something to do with it ;)

The train rolled on, bringing us to Israel, where we learned about Hanukkah traditions. We learned a dreidel song and game, and practiced ordinal numbers with our play menorah. We also made glittering Stars of David using two triangles made from popsicle sticks.

Back to the U.S.A. we went! We read a story about the history of Kwanzaa and made kinaras using the shapes we studied during our last math unit:

Today, we had some very special guests share with us about the holiday traditions of Mexico! Mariana's family visited our class and we learned SO much about the Three Kings, pinatas, and more. We will learn more about the Three Kings during Spanish next week, and are very excited!

This concludes a very long, but very exciting post. We hope you enjoy, and ask your child about his or her favorite holiday traditions thus far :)