The Continent Song

Asia

We learned about the biggest continent, Asia! We took a trip to India to see the tea fields, the schools, and the elephants. The elephants played soccer, painted pictures, threw darts, and bathed themsleves. Then we popped over to Thailand to see Tigers! On our trip, we got Henna tattoos! In a couple of weeks we will have a visitor from Japan (well, she is really American just living in Japan) come and teach us how to count in Japanese!

Aux Champs-Elysees

North Pole and Antarctica

On Friday, we learned a little bit about the North Pole. Today we continued our North Pole learnings as well as learned about the coldest continent, Antarctica (also called the South Pole). We read a story about the animals at the North Pole and how they are in danger because of different things. One of the things that it talked about was the Arctic pipeline. We had a wonderful discussion as to what the kids thought about it. If they thought it was good there they had to say what we should do with the animals. If they thought we should not have it there, they had to say how we will get oil for our cars and houses. Here are some of their answers:
James- Keep the pipeline and move all of the animals to a place where there are not already a lot of animals
Luke- Keep the pipeline and move the animals away
Jimmy- Keep the pipeline on one side and the animals on the other
Seth- move the pipeline underwater
Victor- we have to keep the pipeline because we need the oil for our cars and to go on longer trips on airplanes. Maybe we can move the animals underwater!
Miranda- Can't we just move the pipes to Antarctica since there is not much there? Or just send this problem to Santa. He is already up there and he can fix it!
Ari- Let's move the pipeline to Asia but not to Tokyo.
Megan- Keep the pipeline on one side of the North Pole and have the animals go to the other.
Isabel- Move the pipe to Antarctica
Kelsey- Move the pipe away but I am not sure where
Hayden- We don't need the pipeline at all. People can ride horses instead of using cars.
Xander- Take the pipeline away from the North Pole and move it to a different state so I can still get gas because I need it. We could use a gas needle to find gas somewhere in Asia.

What an insightful group we have!

Australia

To learn about Australia, we had a wonderful discussion about the fact that the continent Australia contains the countries of Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji. There is a movement (and some places have already done this) to change the name of the continent to Oceania. We wrote a letter to the prime minister of Australia to let her know our thoughts. Here is the letter:

Dear Prime Minister Gillard,
We are learning about Australia right now both the country and the continent. We read a book saying that some people want to change the name of the continent to Oceania. Most of our kindergarten class at Imagine Charter School agrees. We think it would be more fair to the people of Fiji and New Zealand. We think that everyone would be happier because 2 countries want the name to be Oceania. And everyone in the whole world would like to live there much better.
If you don't change it, that is ok too because some of us want the name to stay Australia since it is already like that on the maps and globes. But Ms. Baker says that some maps already say Oceania on them. We have not seen one though. Have you? What do you think the name should be?
We hope you have a great day and a great weekend.
Love,
Ms. Baker's kindergarten class
P.S. We have been listening to Waltzing Matilda and really like it.

Europe

For Europe we got to eat a baguette, make some Greek salad, sing Aux Champs Elysees, and build the Eiffel Tower. I was so impressed by the kids when they all tried (and most of them loved) Greek salad. They also used teamwork to build the Eiffel Tower out of straws. They had to plan how it would look, lay it out, and put it all together. One group even got theirs to stand up by using "feet" and "not making it so tall"!

Fasten your seat belts...

Last week we began our kindergarten "trip around the world!" We made suitcases and passports for our trip and boarded "Ms. Baker airlines" which will conveniently take us to each of the seven continents but have us back at school in time for afternoon pickup!