Holiday Traditions

From America to Finland, to other parts of the world, people celebrate holidays with special rituals and festivities.  To learn how America's holiday traditions are similar and different from Finland's students created cartoon images depicting one of their holiday traditions.

Spreading cheer both far and near

Last Friday Team Gibbas students crafted a surprise for their Finnish friends.  Each student was paired with a student in our partner class at the Ojanpera School in Liminka, Finland.  Then, students created a holiday greeting card for each Finnish friend as a holiday surprise.  We mailed our cards on Monday and we can't wait to hear from our friends in Finland when our package arrives!

Data Collection Through Class Challenges

Essential Question:  What is the best way to display data?

While learning about bar graphs, line graphs, and picture graphs Team Gibbas students experienced some fun, hands-on, and authentic opportunities to collect and display data.  Students participated in two class challenges.  The first was a dice challenge where students and teachers balanced as many dice as they could on a popsicle stick that they held in their mouth.  The second challenge was a time test to see how long students could hold a wall sit in the gym.

After collecting the data, we decided as a class how best to display our data.  Students chose to display the dice challenge data with bar graphs.  

A line graph was chosen for the wall squat data as the number of students holding the squat changed over time.

How well do you know the United States?

Today Proctor School fourth graders were treated to a captivating, interactive geography lesson.  Students participated in The Geography Gameshow whereby they learned facts about the United States as Cape Cod artist Neal Nichols drew a map of the United States from memory.  Then at the end of the program some students were chosen to come up to the map and challenged to see how many questions they could answer about the United States using the map.

It was amazing to see how much students learned from this fun and engaging program.
Thank you TESPTO for making this curriculum enrichment experience possible!