Open Aula and Calabaza Carving (Pumpkin Carving) :)

This week has been a great week at the school!  I have been learning so much!  The school has studies different countries and have different open aulas (open classrooms) where the national teachers plan activities once a month and the international teachers plan activities once a month. 
For the international teachers open aula we planned activities related to Taiwan.  Megan and I planned to make lanterns with the children!  It is pretty amazing the things you can think of doing with such little resources!  It seemed to be a big hit for the children because I put together about 90 papers and we only had about 10-15 left afterwards! 

Here are just a few pictures of the open aula- it is basically a free for all and the children can go to the different location throughout the school and participate in the activities of their liking! 

This is a picture from the national teachers open aula- one of the activities was making masks!

This is from our open aula where the children make lanterns out of paper!!  They turned out great!!!




This whole month the children have been learning about pumpkins and singing several songs about pumpkins (while learning about body parts - where eyes nose and mouth are on a head- color recognition, size and shape, they have been learning to count and recognize numbers in English as well!  All through the use of pumpkins)!   As well as learning about the American culture/holiday- Halloween and what people in the states do with pumpkins!! 
This not only seemed to fun for the children but I think Megan and I enjoyed gutting and carving pumpkins as much as the children did!  (some child seemed very skeptical of touching or putting their hands inside the pumpkins while others dove right in and seemed to enjoy it greatly!!) 
Here are some pictures !

As we had been teaching the children that pumpkins are orange - we had to suddenly tell them that pumpkins in the United States are orange while pumpkins in Ecuador are green (unless they are just not fully rip yet)  But we explained this to the children and then began gutting the calabazas.

We broke off into to groups for each classroom (Kindergarten and Preschool both got to participate in calabaza carving!! 

                                                                       Digging right in!!!! 

After we finished with all four pumpkins we put candles in them and had the children come in and look at the Jack O' Lanterns!!  We than sang the Jack O' Lantern song while admiring our creations !!! 

I think it looks more like a watermelon on the outside than the typical pumpkins you see in the US. 

Jack O' Lantern!! 

This was so much fun!  We cleaned the seeds and plan to have the children count out the seeds and place the correct amount of seeds to the corresponding numbers 0-10 on pumpkins that they painted!  We also hope to have a few seeds left to cook for the children to try!  We are also going to try to make a pumpkin soup and pumpkin bread from two of the pumpkins (that way we dont waste them)!!

Things have been great here!  More to come later!

Chau!!