Golden Birthday Ball

Start a new tradition that children in Switzerland really enjoy. Roll a Golden Birthday Ball and share good wishes with the birthday child!

1.

Here’s a Swiss way to say "Happy Birthday!" Children lay decorated fabric on the floor and sit around it. The birthday child rolls a Golden Ball to one person at a time. Each friend rolls the ball back to the birthday child while extending a greeting. After all wishes are given, the birthday cloth is put on the back of the birthday child’s chair. You can make the fabric and ball to use in your classroom.
2.

Decorate the fabric. On paper, use Crayola® Erasable Colored Pencils and your imagination to sketch ideas to decorate the birthday fabric. Just erase if you change your mind.
3.

On cotton or 50/50 cotton/polyester fabric, use Crayola Fabric Markers to design the birthday greetings. If the fabric is likely to be laundered, ask an adult to heat-set the colors by putting it in a dryer for 30 minutes on the hottest setting.
4.

Make the Golden Ball. Roll Crayola Model Magic into a ball. Air-dry it 24 hours.
5.

Cover your craft area with newspaper. Using gold Crayola Premier Tempera and a Crayola Brush, paint your ball. Air-dry it. Enjoy celebrating your new birthday tradition often!

Standards

LA: Read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to support comprehension.
LA: Engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions with diverse partners on grade level topics and texts, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly.
LA: Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing.
LA: Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English grammar and usage when writing or speaking.
LA: Report on a topic or text, tell a story, or recount an experience in an organized manner, using appropriate facts and relevant, descriptive details to support main ideas or themes; speak clearly at an understandable pace.
SS: Describe ways in which language, stories, folktales, music, and artistic creations serve as expressions of culture and influence behavior of people living in a particular culture.
SS: Use appropriate resources, data sources, and geographic tools to generate, manipulate, and interpret information.
SS: Describe how people create places that reflect ideas, personality, culture, and wants and needs as they design homes, playgrounds, classrooms, and the like.
VA: Use different media, techniques, and processes to communicate ideas, experiences, and stories.
VA: Use visual structures of art to communicate ideas.
VA: Use different media, techniques, and processes to communicate ideas, experiences, and stories.

Possible classroom resources include: Christmas in Switzerland by World Book; A Child's Introduction to the World: Geography, Cultures, and People - From the Grand Canyon to the Great Wall of China by Heather Alexander; Welcome to Switzerland by Pamela K. Harris
Students research the country Switzerland, its customs, traditions, etc. Students demonstrate the use of the Birthday Cloth in celebrating classroom birthdays.
Students research other countries to discover how birthdays are celebrated. For instance, in Mexico a large party is give to girls on their 15th birthday. Russians eat birthday pie, birthday chairs are common in Lithuania and Holland, and a birthday flag is hung outside the house of the birthday person who lives in Denmark. As the school year progresses, practice each of the traditions researched by students.
Ask the world language teacher to teach the students how to sing Happy Birthday in the foreign language they are currently studying. Practice this for the next birthday celebration!