'Tis the season? - Well, it was...

This Advent I used the Jesse Tree as a focus for our class liturgy. This tied together nicely many of the ideas we had learnt throughout the year.
(I have been meaning to write this post for well over a month. In fact, it might have been more useful to others if I had shared my Advent ideas while it was still Advent, but you'll have to tuck this away for Advent 2013! I am writing it now so I will remember myself.)
Way back in Term 1 we had learnt about the liturgical seasons. I was very pleased that so many of the children were able to recall things we had done that long ago. It gives me hope! This term we had focused on different forms of prayer and we had been reading the Old Testament stories in our daily scripture time. The Jesse Tree Liturgy tied all of these things together nicely and was a fitting end-of-year celebration.
We learnt about the Jesse Tree in class prior to the liturgy and had made a bulletin board display. (The colours are not the best - I was using up the scraps of cardboard etc in the room - but it was a simple display idea.)
Each child made an "ornament" to place on the tree on the bulletin board. The ornaments show a picture or a symbol that the student felt represented person in their story. There are lots of websites that have lists of Jesse Tree symbols and they are not all the same. I kept searching until I found one that had the right number of symbols so each child got one and I also looked for one that had a fair proportion of women represented as well.

The words on the sign say: "The Jesse Tree is a symbol of Advent. The symbols remind us of the stories from the Old Testament that point to the birth of Jesus Christ. Jesse was the father of David and was Jesus' great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather." I think there are supposed to be about 24 "great"s but I don't think my kids were bothered with counting them.
On the last morning of school we had a prayer celebration to end our year. You can access the words of the liturgy from my TeachersPayTeachers site.
The songs I used were by Michael Mangan from his This is the Time (Songs for Seasons) Album. The children were already familiar with these songs. You could easily substitute other hymns or carols.
The students made their own symbols (white paper circle glued onto a slightly larger coloured circle) and they glued the words for their prayer on the back so they stood up, read their prayer and placed it on the tree in a reasonably seamless manner.

We set up the sacred space in the middle and the children chose what to put in there. There was a lot of purple because that is the Advent colour. (They learnt that in first term!)
Just as we started the liturgy I realised I didn't have any matches to light the candle. Luckily I was able to download a free Candle app on my iPad mini and save the day!

Poinsettias for Christmas

During the last few weeks of school we did a number of Christmas related activities based on some beautiful Christmas books I own.
The first of these is The Legend of the Poinsettia which is retold and beautifully illustrated by Tomie dePaola.

The story is set in Mexico and tells of a little girl whose mother falls ill just before the town's Nativity celebration. Her mother is unable to complete the family's gift for the baby Jesus and the little girl is unable to complete it on her own. Luckily a Christmas miracle occurs and the girl has a beautiful gift for the baby after all.
This story is a good Christmas story because it opens up conversations about gift giving at Christmas and how it is "the thought that counts". It also explains one of the Christmas decorations - the poinsettia and introduces the Christmas colours of red and green. We had a discussion about how the people in Mexico celebrated Christmas in the story and how this is the same and different from some of our own Christmas customs. We are a catholic school so many of the children do go to the Christmas mass and take part in the nativity so it was nice to see how another culture celebrates this idea.
To reflect on the story and to brighten our classroom, we made a very simple Christmas craft: a poinsettia.

I prefer to use painted paper because it has a richer texture than coloured construction paper and it is fun to paint the paper yourself. Each child painted one A4 sheet of red and one A4 sheet of green on one day and the next day they used this paper to assemble their craft. We re-used paper from our classroom to make the activity even more environmentally friendly.
I make hand-drawn "star" templates on light card in red and green and write "cut 1" on the green and "cut 2" on the red. The green one is slightly larger than the red one. If you are not game to free draw yours (even though I think they look better) you can print this image. (You will need to adjust the size to suit your paper.)

I make only enough templates for about a third of the class for each colour (about 8 red ones and 8 green ones for a class of 24). It doesn't take them long to trace the shapes and it is good for them to be a bit patient and practice their turn taking skills.

They turn the paper to the "white side" before tracing in case they make a mistake and they push the star to the edge of the paper so the leftover pieces are useful for other Christmas crafts later on. They need to be careful so they fit two red stars on the same page. 

To assemble the craft, simply stack the two red shapes on top of the green on and turn them slightly so you can see the different points from behind. A little dab of glue in the centre is enough to hold them together. I give them little squares of yellow crepe or tissue paper to scruple into balls for the centre of the flower.

They are really simple to make. It took me longer to explain it than it does to make them.

Enjoy!

The Last Supper

Here is another great idea I borrowed from Catholic Icing.

We had to collect a mountain of egg cartons and then one of the lovely mums from my class took them home one weekend and joined them together for me so that the bit the kids did would go more smoothly.

I downloaded the sheets from Catholic Icing and the kids painted them with the water colour paints in the pallettes. Not much mess and nice bright colours. Plus they had a lot of fun!

This afternoon they cut out the characters and attached them to the carton in order using kid's PVA glue.
This photo is not of the best one, but the colours are nice and bright!

They had a lot of fun cutting and gluing and talking about who was who at the dinner table. I don't expect that they will remember all of the characters but it was a fun way for them to think about the disciples and to discuss the Last Supper.

It took about an hour of cutting, gluing and cleaning up time this afternoon. A different Easter craft - a nice chang from the stock-standard bunny colouring-in sheet!

We didn't have quite enough egg cartons so some children did a "2D version". Great incidental maths revision!
Here is the 2D adaption if you don't want to collect 48 egg cartons. (and I have to work out how to rotate the picture but I'm in a hurry and my brain is worn out - sorry).

Happy Easter!

An Easter Rooster?

Today we looked at the Holy Week Story: Peter disowns Jesus.
In this story, Peter hears a rooster crowing and is reminded that Jesus had warned him that before the rooster crowed twice, Peter would have denied knowing Jesus three times.
I wanted a simple but memorable activity for my students to do while they reflected on the story and I am trying to avoid "death by blackline master" in my class.
A pile of paper plates left over from a lifecycle craft activity provided the inspiration for our roosters. Because I didn't give them a template, they each have their own quirky character!

Each child used half a paper plate as the "body" for their rooster, and then (loosely copying my model) they attached paper and card to the semi-circle to create their own rooster.
Once they had designed and created their rooster, they selected three feather to attach for the tail. The three feathers reminded the students of the three times that Peter disowned Jesus.
We also watched this You Tube clip of a puppet show. This was good because it retold some of the other events we had talked about on previous days too, but this time from Peter's perspective.

When they sat on the carpet this afternoon at the end of the day, we recapped the story. I was happy with the level of detail they were able to recall from the story and am hoping they will retell the story with as much enthusiasm when they took their roosters home with them.

12 Stories of Holy Week

In the lead up to Easter, we are investigating the Holy Week stories in Year 2. By the end of the term, I am hoping that my students will be able to retell the key events of Holy Week and be able to reflect on some of the messages in these stories.
I identified 12 key stories from Holy Week and have been retelling the stories in different ways each day and revising the key events with the students using a simple PowerPoint presentation that I made and some "Holy Week eggs" - based on the brilliant idea from Catholic Icing. I forgot to take photos of my eggs so I will have to do that later and add them to this post.
Other things I have done (or will be doing) to present the stories:
* Songs - Hymns, kids praise songs and songs from Jesus Christ Superstar which tell about key events.
* Videos - mostly from You Tube - some of them are better quality than others. They loved the Ollie the Donkey video for Palm Sunday.
* Craft - Palm Sunday Leaves, Rooster craft (for Peter disowns Jesus), Last Supper craft (from Catholic Icing)
* Activities - wordsearches, drawing responses
* Experiences/ Role Play - Palm Sunday parade, Washing feet, Passover meal - tasting, Stations of the Cross
* Stories - reading versions from Children's Bibles, retellings from picture books, reading from the Bible

I have made some cards that match the PowerPoint slide I have been using and I will use these with my students for them to practise sequencing and retelling the stories.

So far my students have been enjoying the activities for each story. I hope this increases their understanding of the true meaning of Easter.

Calendars, Months, Seasons and Colours!

We have been learning the days of the week, months of the year and now the seasons as part of our beginning of the year work on Calendars.
Great minds must think alike because Kylie over at Down Under Teacher has been doing the same topic. Check out her blog for even more ideas!
The Australian Curriculum for Mathematics requires that students can name and order the months and seasons and use a calendar to identify the date and determine the number of days in each month.
I have made a simple worksheet that requires students to write in the months of the year and identify the seasons. You can download it for free.

I am working on a quiz sheet that will require students to use a calendar to answer a series of questions. When I get it done, I will put it up too.
My kids are going to work with a partner this week to make their own page of a class calendar that we will put up in our room to celebrate the end of this part of our learning.

We have linked our study of seasons of the year to our cross-curricular priority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures by learning about the seasons in Arnhem Land through reading the great picture book: Ernie Dances to the Didgeridoo by Alison Lester.

The students really enjoyed the story and it lead to some great discussion about the seasons we experience in Queensland compared to places that are much colder or hotter.

Because we are a Catholic school, our discussion of seasons has been a great segue into learning about the Liturgical Seasons too.

We have constructed a display in our room which focuses on the different colours of the seasons.

Yesterday our fantastic Assistant Principal, Michelle, came in to talk to the students about the special colours of the liturgical seasons. The children enjoyed having a special guest speaker.

She used an experiment with milk and food colouring to show the different colours. The children thought it was fun to watch the colours swirling in the bowl and we had a great discussion about the "pictures" they could see within the patterns. They surprised me with their deep thinking about the colours and the seasons.

I love it when all of the different things we are learning about tie together so beautifully!

Have you been learning and teaching about seasons? What have your students enjoyed?