Circus Preparation and Polar Animals

Hello!
This coming week is Catholic Schools Week and celebrated in various ways throughout the USA. In our school, we celebrate Mass and the Rosary together as a school. We attend a volleyball game with our 8th grade girls vs our 8th grade boys. We gather into multi-age groups to create Valentines for local nursing home residents. We host an Open House for our prospective and current school families. Our Parent Club prepares a yummy meal for teachers and provides substitute teachers for us so that we can enjoy an HOUR LONG meal together as a staff!! It is so funny to watch us eat this meal. Our regular lunch time is 30 minutes and that includes walking our students to lunch and picking them up. During this lunch, we can often be found at the copy machine, the cutting board, the Ellison cutter.... so our actual meal time is usually less than 15 minutes. So..... when we have a full hour to eat, we don't really know what to do! But it is a lovely time and so appreciated!

In our school, students are encouraged to perform some type of service project/activity. In kindergarten, this requires some creative thought because it is extremely difficult to transport 5 and 6 year old children in something other than a bus! So, our kiddos perform a circus and have a freewill donation bucket at the door. We choose an organization in which to send our money and this year, we once again, will be sending it to Polar Bears International. Besides doing a circus, our January theme is Winter and the Polar Regions, so this works out perfectly with our monthly unit!

Besides performing a circus, we also decorate our kindergarten hallway in preparation for our Open House. This year, we will be creating a Polar Circus Express train station! Here is a picture of our painted boxes for the train. We were unsure as to what type of paint to use for them. The blue and yellow boxes were painted with an oil base paint; very shiny, but impossible to get out of clothes and it really stains hands! The black and red boxes were painted with our classroom Tempera paint. Other than having a dull sheen instead of a shiny one, it covered just as nicely as the more expensive paint. We are hoping to put the train together tomorrow... hopefully..... because the weather report says that we are under an Ice Storm advisory tomorrow! Sigh.......... I will post the pictures when it is finished!
My kiddos painted their circus background mural. We have 3 kindergartens, so each kindergarten painted one mural that we will attach together as one background. We found our pictures by typing in "circus" on Google. I hand drew mine, but my co-workers enlarged theirs on our overhead projector; yes, we still have one of those dinosaur machines!

We also are working on our polar animal book. This week we studied the Arctic. We concentrate mostly on the animals and stress that polar bears and penguins do NOT live in the same habitat. Next week we will do our blubber experiment. We just did not have time to do it this week because of circus practice and preparation!