Show and Tell

The second-to-last week of school, Sadie's kindergarten teacher wanted her students to do four days of show-and-tell. Each day had a specified part of the alphabet - the thing you brought had to start with one of the letters. For example, the first day was A - D, I think.

What better time than now to get Sadie acquainted with China? I thought. I asked if she might want to talk about different aspects of China each day for show-and-tell. I was surprised that she agreed. I thought for sure she would want to bring her Littlest Pet Shops, My Little Ponies, etc. Anything with "little" in the title is her favorite.

So Sadie and I spent that week doing research on China. I would give her several ideas for what she could talk about on each day, and she would pick one.

For the first day, which was letters A - D, she wanted to talk about Baoding. We picked up a map at Tools for Learning and made sure to point out where Baoding was:

The next day (E - H) , she wanted to talk about the Great Wall of China:

She and I learned that, if you add all the little sections of the Great Wall of China together, it's more than 5,000 miles long. We also learned that an estimated one million people died making it through the years. Oh, and one more factoid - you canNOT see it from space. That's an urban myth.

On the third day (I - P), Sadie decided to talk about pearls. China is the world's largest exporter of pearls. My mom was holding onto a pearl necklace to give to Sades when she turns eight, but she decided to give it to her early so she could show it to the class:

She LOVES her pearl necklace. She told the class what she learned about how pearls are made, with the mussels and the speck of dirt and the irritation, yadda, yadda, yadda.

On the last day (Q - Z), Sadie wanted to talk about train transportation in China:

She very, very much wants to ride on one bullet train and one sleeping train. That is her biggest goal for our time in China. She and I also learned to avoid train travel during the Chinese New Year - talk about crowded. The pictures I've seen of train stations that time of year give me a mixture of Social Anxiety Disorder and Claustrophobia. We'll stay put in Baoding during that time, I think.