The Orient Express

So....this post is incredibly late, but so worth posting! This was my favorite week all summer. I loved everything we did and there were so many incredible things to learn and discover about the countries we studied. Although our theme was "The Orient" we concentrated on China and Japan. I could have done this study for weeks! We started with Japan. We used rakes, sea shells and beads to create zen gardens.


We also tackled this pinterest inspired project and made our own playdough and seaweed sushi. It was such a big hit, the kids loved it.

We added our sushi to the home center for some orient inspired dramatic play.

For a literature connection we read several wonderful stories. This one was really sweet.

The story is about Children's Day in Japan. They make a kite for each child in the family. We made our own carp kites!

We also learned how to write Chinese symbols. This was a favorite project as well. One of the moms was very sweet to bring in a book from home written in Chinese. The kids loved looking at it and marveled at how different it looked than the books in our library.

We learned all about Sumo wrestlers and how they can not touch the ground and have to stay within the perimeter of a circle. We cut out and colored these wrestlers, taped them to cups and then played a game where we tried to blow our opponents wrestler off the table with a straw. It was really funny to watch.

For our cooking project we made fortune cookies. They were a little difficult to make and turned out sort of soft, but the kids thought they were really cool. We put someone's name in each one and they had fun finding the person whose name they had.

We discussed China's largest crop: rice! We played with rice in the sensory table.

Ms. Rachel read facts about China and Japan and we recreated their national flags.

The kids decided to make the sushi and noodles in home center into a resteraunt. They colored bamboo for a back drop for the resteraunt. So adorable!

And our best cooking project yet....Ms. Shannon fried rice for us! We even had our cooking area set up like a Hibachi grill! I couldn't believe how many kids devoured the fried rice.

We also read this sweet story with a very important moral.

Since I was moving and had a ton of extra boxes, we made these red clogs!

Aren't they stinkin cute?

Here's one of our morning messages.

I truly enjoyed every minute of this unit and the kids had a wonderful time. It was a great wrap up to our summer camp. Now I'm busy getting to know my new class and the year is already going by fast! Hopefully I can post pictures of the first few weeks of school tomorrow, the consent forms are almost all signed!