Happy
Easter from Germany! Easter is a big holiday celebration in Germany. It begins
on Good Friday and ends on Easter Monday, with both Friday and Monday being a
holiday. Schools usually have two weeks off during this time. (Wish we did
too!) Easter Sunday is celebrated like many families do in the states, hiding
hard boiled eggs and candy for the children, attending an Easter service and
then a family dinner. The traditional German Easter lunch includes lamb,
potatoes and fresh vegetables. Yum!
Another
Easter tradition is the use of the noise maker by the village children. Beginning on Thursday before Easter Sunday,
the church bells are silenced and the village children go around with wooden
noise makers at various times of the day with their wooden noise makers to fill
in for the quiet church bells. Many of
these noise makers are very old and are family heirlooms.
Preparations
for Easter begin several weeks ahead of time with flowers being displayed in
planters, trees being decorated with eggs, and Easter markets where vendors
sell handcrafted Easter eggs and Easter crafts. Did you know that boiling and
painting eggs is a custom that began in Germany? The eggs symbolize new life
and the colors characterize sunlight and growth. Germany is also the birth
place for the chocolate bunny. Thank you Germany!
This week's activities included the egg and oviparous animals.
Pixie slides on the egg:
Pixie slides on Oviparous Animals:
This weeks activities included research projects. Writing samples:
simplebooklet.com
German Klappern (noise maker)
Kindness book of the week: One Hundred Eggs for Henrietta by Sally Huss
Henrietta the hen
learns that there will be 100 children coming for the egg hunt. She begins
racing around collecting eggs and realizes they will not have enough. So, being
the hen in charge, she decides to call on the ducks, swans and geese for help.
She also has to enlist the help of the rabbits, the cats and a hummingbird in
order to complete their mission. This story illustrates the importance of
working together and being helpful. It
is a great story to teach children about teamwork, and about not giving up when
things look impossible.
Easter and the egg iPads Apps:
iColor
Easter Eggs is an Easter app for any age. Using iColor Easter Eggs you can
create a custom Easter Egg and then share it with your friends through email,
Facebook or save it to your photo library.
"Fingerprint
Art" allows you to create fingerprint art.
Paint Easter Eggs: This egg painting app is perfect for children of all ages.
Take some drawing and relax time together and color some eggs.
Instead of an egg timer - what about a rotation timer for your center time? Here's a freebie:
Youtube video links on the egg and insects:
 |
 |
Another free digital slideshow by Smilebox.jpg) |
No comments:
Post a Comment