Lunar New Year Try-It Tuesday

This week's Try-It Tuesday event was to create your own dragon out of egg cartons, toilet paper tubes, and yarn. This is the idea I had in my head: http://www.pinkstripeysocks.com/2015/02/recycled-chinese-new-year-dragon-craft.html

 I put a tarp out on the floor, paint, paintbrushes, and let the kids go to town! I had Valentine supplies out as a way to pass the time while the paint was drying. Unfortunately, it took them an hour of my hour and a half program to paint. So I scrambled around to make kids for them to take home to complete their project with the addition of fasteners, straws and the directions. They had a grand time (well until Valentine making. That's when some kids decided computers were cooler.) I would do this craft again, but with way more time planned and activities to do while waiting.

Groundhogs and Weather

Every Tuesday after school I do a program called Try-It Tuesday. I have various things that I do--mostly crafts or science experiments.  On Groundhog Day, I decided we should concentrate on the topic at hand.

I started by reading Groundhog Weather School by Joan Holub. My program is aimed at grades 2-5, and I mostly get second graders, so this went over pretty well.

Next, we made homemade barometers similar to the one at this link. https://www.sercc.com/education_files/barometer.pdf

This went okay. The kids didn't really understand what I was doing, and they were more interested in squabbling with each other ("Girls rule!" "No, boys rule!")

After this, we played a game with beanbags that I called "Groundhog Toss" which got some of the energy out. I put a basket on the floor at various distances and they had to get as many bean bags in as they could. We played this for about 15 minutes, then we switched to groundhog Bingo for fifteen minutes.

I don't know that I would repeat this program again. I've had other programs with this same group of kids that held their interest more.