An Internet Project
This is another fun project from Marci McGowan. It asks participants to choose a book with a winter theme and after reading it together, create a class poem for posting on the project site.
Marci has compiled some wonderful resources to assist participants:
- An extensive list of books with a Winter Theme
- Lots of Poetry Resources
- To learn more about the project, click here.
To take a look inside the book, click on it!
For our work on the project, we chose the book In the Snow by Huy Voun Lee.
With the Chinese New Year on the horizon, this was a perfect choice! In the story a mother takes her son out into the first snow to introduce him to the writing of Chinese characters.
This book is an excellent way to introduce students to the written Chinese language.
We had had frigid temperatures in Massachusetts and most of our snow had turned into solid ice. This morning, however, we had had snow showers, and the dusting of snow provided a perfect "canvas of white" - just like in the book!
On the front and back pages of In the Snow are all the Chinese characters introduced in the story. Bundled up and armed with paintbrushes and copies of the characters, we set outside to create our own on our "canvases of white."
EVERYONE did a tremendous job!
Below are just a few examples of our wonderful work.
Can you find the characters for snow, moon, tree, forest and rest?
I challenged the class to create a poem using only the characters from the story.
Here is what we wrote...
Snow sparkling
in the sun,
still bright
under the moon.
Below please find some resources to help extend the learning.
Links to Learning
Huy Voun Lee Books
Included are two companion books for In the Snow - At the Beach and In the Park
Write Chinese characters for numbers 1-10
A printable sheet for writing number characters
Animated Chinese Characters
Click on a topic, then a character and you will see an animated version of how to write it.
To Window to Our World - our classroom website