Dear friends of b8,

We are in Egypt and we are having fun. Today we are making our names in hieroglyphics. Hieroglyphics is an alphabet that Ancient Egyptians used a long time ago. They would write messages on rocks. 

Our names that we wrote in hieroglyphics

The 

hieroglyphics were kind of hard to make. Mrs. Thompson gave us a translator sheet so that we knew what symbols to use. First we wrote our rough copy in pencil so that we could erase it if we made a mistake. Then for our good copy we traced the pencil with black marker. 

One thing that we learned was that it took us way longer to write like this than in English. We think that Egyptians would probably be faster because they would have more practice. 

      Can you read this
       secret message?

Sincerely,

Waylon, Megan and Danielle

Dear family and friends,

We are in Peru and have been learning a lot about the country.

One thing we have done here is made frogs just like the tree frogs all over Peru. We took a piece of paper with half of a frog on it and folded it in half and cut it out. Then we folded the paper back open and had the shape of a frog. After that we coloured. Some people used frog colours like green and other people did cool designs like polka-dots. When we were done we stuck them up to the ceiling and some of them have started to hop down into our classroom.

All of the funky frogs that fell from the ceiling.

Some of the surviving frogs still remaining on the ceiling

Yesterday we read a book about a Peruvian boy named Thomasino that came from a poor family that wove clothing out of string. Today we started doing some weaving ourselves using yarn. We like doing the weaving because it is fun.

The weaving we are doing in class.

We are having a great time in Peru and are excited to do more activities here.

From,

Olivia and Cooper

Irish Potato Stamps and Soda Bread

Dear everyone,

We are in Ireland!!! They used to eat a lot of potatoes here.

We used potatoes to make potato stamps. The first thing we did was get a potato. Next we cut the potato in half. Then we got a three leaf clover cookie cutter, turned the potato over, and pushed the potato into it as hard as Ms. Thompson could to make a print. Next we cut around the cookie cutter using a  knife. After we took the cookie-cutter out, we made a handle in the back of the potato to make it easier to hold.

The handle on the back of the potato

The next step was to paint the clover using white, orange, and green, the colours on one of the Irish flags. We got paper and began to make a design using our stamps. Our artwork was very good and we had a great time making it.

A Irish flag made with potato stamps

We also made Irish Soda Bread. Irish Soda Bread is a bread that uses lots of butter milk that is very popular in Ireland. Instead of the yeast they used baking soda as a rising agent and that's how it got its name. It was very thick and yummy and tasted sort of like pancakes.

A green potato stamp that we made

We had a great time there and would love to go back one day.

Sincerely,

Lili and Cole