Dia del Nino

I wish I knew about this before, but the celebration of El Dia del Nino with free programs supporting literacy at the libraries in Sacramento will last until April 30.
Here's the link if you're interested,
http://www.saclibrary.org/About-Us/News/2013/April/El-Dia-de-los-Ninos/

La ciudad

Hola a todo(a)s!

After two weeks of intense 30-minute work sessions, I'm very proud & happy to share the ending result of our project on building a small city. By a majority of votes, la ciudad was named: Hollywood. 

Along the way, we reviewed vocabulary on different places of the community such as: el hospital, la panaderia, el parque, la estacion de bomberos, etc. We also introduced the unit on occupations, which will continue into next week when we do our review on articles: la enfermera, el cocinero, la policia, etc.  All of the following ideas you'll see came from those little curious & creative minds:

La jugueteria (toy store) by Ken & El restaurante by Alee

Tyler helping to write the ocupaciones and the lugar (place) where they work

The pieces of clay on the road are not accidental. They are either: carros (cars) or estatuas .

Tyler made a big pancake-parking lot for La panaderia (bakery)

Their creativity goes to their smallest details: a football  made out of clay on top of  el estadio

Even though,  we introduced  a lot of vocabulary during the project,
making  the signs helped them to associate the names

A better view of una estatua (on the right) & extra decoration  for la panaderia. Do you see the croissants on the roof?

The tower for UCD implied some problem-solving skills for Luca because he had to figure out how to stand it without letting it fall.

Madi was very creative on making libros (books) para la biblioteca (library).

Sean also inspired us with his passion for sports. He created a very detail estadio with a score board and everything! Of course, you can tell what's his favorite team by looking at the score he wrote...

Ken has one of the greatest memories, I've ever seen!  Here, he's helping us to review the vocabulary.

Taking a break from building to review the vocabulary

   

Building, building, building!
Alee designed the sign for the name of our ciudad: Hollywood. See the final result in the final picture.

Discussing how to make people out of clay for the occupations in our town.

Writing signs in Spanish

The best part of projects: working as a team!

Last picture showing their work proudly. 

Review before the break

Here are some pictures of the extensive group work we did prior to our spring break. We review key lessons such as: colors, parts of the body, food, questions,and  days of the week.

It got so busy working in groups, that I just had time to take pictures of what we wrote on the board after the children were gone, but we did an extensive review. My favorite activity was making our own food bingo because the children didn't limit themselves to the words they already knew, but they also were very curious about asking about all kinds of common and unusual kinds of food... you'll understand better when you see the vocabulary they asked me by saying: Como se dice...?

Also, Get ready for our greatest project after the break: building our own mini-town to introduce two lessons: places of the community & occupations. Lots of fun, learning &  pictures coming up!!!