Celebrating Chinese New Year With Picture Books, Virtual Reality, Ozobots and a Collection By Destiny!

This week at Van Meter we are celebrating the upcoming Chinese New Year in lots of special ways. 

During our holiday break, I worked on a new collection of books focused around Chinese New Year after lots of reading, searching and wonderful suggestions from my dear friend, Tanja Galetti, who is a school librarian in Hong Kong.  

Before they become part of our library collection, these books are part of our You've Been Book'd program this month and...

 ...our 3rd grade teachers have been reading all of them as we get ready for a project with their students throughout the week.

To kick off the project today, we visited three places around the world to see how they celebrate Chinese New Year.  

Our students always love the places our MERGE goggles take us and had so much fun seeing these celebrations. 

You will find the Chinese New Year Virtual Reality 360 Tours poster that we created here. 

To use this with your students, just have them scan the QR codes and use with MERGE or another type of virtual reality goggles. If you don't have the goggles, all of the videos can be viewed as a class or on a device too. 

We keep the poster up in the front of the room so all of the students can scan the QR codes easily. 

Throughout the week, they will continue to learn about Chinese New Year through books, the article in PebbleGo and other various resources found in our Chinese New Year Collection by Destiny.  

Please feel free to use the Chinese New Year Collection by Destiny you will find here. 

On Friday, which is Chinese New Year, our third graders will get ready to create and code their own celebration using our classroom set of Ozobots and a whole lot of other fun supplies and information.

Last fall, they created and coded an Ozobot Homecoming Parade which they loved!

 You will find a post about the Ozobot Homecoming Parade Project here.

This project and day will be extra exciting as they pick up where they left off with the Ozobots and will learn about OzoBlockly while using the...

...Ozobots, app, iPads, picture books and knowledge they gained with all of the reading and activities this week.  

We can't wait for our special Chinese New Year at Van Meter and we look forward to sharing it with all of you!