Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Making dreidels

I found a tutorial and a template for making dreidels online and used it as part of a middle school
lesson on winter holidays. The students enjoyed this one. Here you can see some of the 2nd graders working. The 2nd grade classes have always been more talkative than the other MS classes and they're thus harder to keep focused. This lesson worked though: they liked creating something and they were occupied.

Two things to note about these pictures:

--Despite having heaters in the classrooms, they are often ineffective in combating the cold. Most students leave their winter coats on all day.

--Razor blades constitute a normal school supply here. Every student has one or more in his pencil case. This blew my mind at first because not only do most (all?) American schools forbid razor blades, many also forbid students from having scissors. Not here. A scene like this would cause an outrage in the States because of the accident/stabbing potential, but not in Korea.

I need to do more activities like this. Doing cultural activities means I get to bridge the gap between English and social studies and it's fun.

Links to the dreidel sites:

http://www.ifcj.org/site/PageNavigator/eng/inside/hanukkah/paper_dreidels

http://bry-backmanor.org/holidayfun/dreidel.html
^this one's good because it explains what the Hebrew characters mean.

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