American Pride

     Saturday was the first warm day of spring. Literally, we were still wearing winter jackets just 24 hours before this gorgeous, 82 degree weather spontaneously decided to come our way. It was the perfect day for the International Festival. The International Festival is a celebration of all the different nationalities which are represented at GWA. Each country has a booth where they display artwork, decorations, and information from their country. Each booth also sells traditional foods from their country (The USA booth sold Coca-Cola, grilled cheeseburgers, apple crisp, candy apples, and cupcakes decorated in red, white, and blue).
     This year, each elementary classroom was responsible for helping an assigned country booth by contributing either artwork or a presentation. I quickly claimed the United States, as I had previously planned a project long before the International Festival was on my radar. There are 46 students in third grade, and I wanted to do a project on the 50 states. Each third grader was assigned a different state to research (The other third grade teacher and I took the remaining 4 states for ourselves). After completing a worksheet research paper on their state, the students took an outline of their state and turned it into a collage of pictures/drawings which were relevant to their assigned state. All of the state outlines fit together into a gigantic USA puzzle when it was complete. Amazing. But that's not all...
    We recruited GWA's finest middle-school music teacher to help us teach The Star Spangled Banner to third grade. We practiced every day for two weeks; and they sounded absolutely perfect toward the end. All but two third graders showed up at the international festival (wearing red, white, and blue) to proudly sing the American National Anthem. Their performance was accompanied by the trumpet (played by the middle-school music teacher) and the cello (played by the French teacher). It was, by far, the best performance at the international festival. After taking a few pictures, David turned on the video-camera and recorded the second half of the song. Check them out!

Proud Third Grade Teachers :)

-Nicole