Plum Garden / 梅园书栈

梅园报晓 Plum Garden News—No.16
January 26 – January 30
Kindergarten / First grade

Important dates
1/31 Shu Ren Chinese Lunar New Year Celebration. 3:00PM-5: 30PM
2/7 Solano Lunar New Year Parade. Starts at 11:00AM.
2/16 President’s day. School Closed.
2/17-2/20 Winter Camp. Extended day care provided. Sign-up for the Camp is needed at the Administrative Office.

Dear Parents,

新年快乐! 恭贺新禧! Happy Chinese New Year! Gong he xin xi! I hope everyone is healthy, and peaceful in the year of OX.

“生日快乐! 思哲! Happy Birthday! Oscar!” Oscar turned 7 years old on Jan 25.

Two Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations are coming up. Below is the information of events’ schedules. Please save your dates for these celebrations. The children are encouraged to wear Chinese outfits on both events.

Saturday, Jan 31 – Shu Ren Chinese Lunar New Year Celebration
3:00pm – 3:30pm: Arrival
3:30pm – 4:15pm: Performance
4:15pm – 5:30pm: Arts and Crafts, Food, and Shu Ren tours
* We would like to have our students be at the school at 3pm so that we will have some time to get ready for their performance. *

Saturday, Feb 7 – Solano Avenue Lunar New Year Celebration.
The parade starts at 11am. We will need to get ready for the parade from 10:30 – 10:45am on Solano Avenue. I will post more details about the schedule and location, as we get closer to the day.

Last Thursday, we all enjoyed our Chinatown adventure very much. We visited Bart stations, Chinese herbal shops, food markets, Dim Sum shops, restaurants, and the library. Thanks Andrew for treating us to the yummy lunch and giving out red envelops to everyone. Also, thanks Winnie for giving red envelopes to the children and thank you Katherine for cooking us our delicious Friday lunches. We have a balance of $30.00 remaining from the field trip. I will use it for the Plum Garden book wish list. Thank you, Parents!

Our inquiry for this week is “庆祝中国农历年 / Celebrating Chinese Lunar New year.”
We will inquire about:
* Lucky words, phrases, and greetings.
* Lantern festival

This week, we have a letter from our English teacher, Teacher Lisa Jean.

Greetings Friends and Families of the Plum Garden Class,

This is Teacher Lisa Jean, the English Teacher working with Kai LaoShur. I have really enjoyed getting to know the students in the Plum Garden Classroom and working with Teacher Kai to support the curricular goals of the program. This is a nuts-and-bolts letter introducing you to our English program.

My focus is supplementing the inquiry unit curriculum by using science and other integrated subject matter to encourage English language development as well as focused English language lessons. Each student now has a Science folder as well as an individual English language folder that you may feel free to peruse when you are in the classroom. You may have noticed some of our integrated English/Language Arts Curriculum coming home – I hope you enjoyed your cranberry relish as well as the pictures of the class using the hand grinder to make it – look forward to some inauguration materials coming home in the next week as well! As with the main Plum Garden curriculum our English class is starting 2009 focusing on weather words, the seasons, poetry recitation, Dr. Martin Luther King, the inauguration as well as Lunar New Year.

A few days each month are devoted to ongoing multiple means of assessment in English/Language Arts (ELA) as well as mathematics. While in the Fall all of the students could recognize upper and lower case letters in and out of order, no one knew all of the sounds of the multiple sound letters – the vowels (and the sometimes vowel ‘y’ as well as ‘g’ and ‘c’. Therefore we have been increasing exposure to these more challenging letter sounds. We have focused on the first half of the Kindergarten “High Frequency” and “Sight” words (I, can, see, the, me, my, you, a) and have moved on to additional words (we, will, to, our, of, is, love, and). In December we started building CVC (3-letter, consonant-vowel-consonant) words. We have also been working on phonemic awareness and working on our short ‘a’ word families: -an, -at, -ap, -am and are moving on to –and, -ang, -ank among others. Students are working with word family, sight word and phonics readers at their own levels. First Grade students are working on initial blends, final ‘S’ sounds as well as word construction and writing. We have been enjoying playing with rhymes as well as recognizing sight words embedded in text. We have introduced predictable books to supplement our inquiry themes. Through integrating these 3 types of reading texts we are supporting reading skills that increase our reading fluency as well!

Much of our work is introduced through small group songs, rhymes and games with worksheets used to reinforce concepts. The students are working well independently and meet individually with me at least 2X/week for a reading and a structured language lesson. I hope you enjoyed hearing your student read to you over vacation.

As of the first of the year we have started with a handwriting program leading up to journal writing. Handwriting is the theme of our January practice-at-home sheets in your homework folders. Please keep the guidelines at home for the entire month. We are focusing on proper use of upper and lower case letters – both recognizing them in text and attending to their proper use in our own writing! We will also be continuing our program of on-going assessment. Our on-going assessments are based upon the California State Standards at the K ->2 levels and we will continue to raise the level as we progress further!

A rough vision of our 1½ hour schedule follows:

10-15 minutes: morning message, calendar, place value math, division and algebra
15 minutes of individual folder work and individual teacher meetings
5-10 minutes: word game
5-10 minutes: content related picture book reading
5 minutes: music and movement and bathroom break
5-10 minutes: phonics game
15 -20 minutes: focused content lesson – science, social studies etc.
10 – 15 minutes chapter book and discussions

Please feel free to catch me at the end of the day or send in notes with any questions or concerns you might have with the ELA program or to review assessed strengths, skills and areas in need of additional support.

–Teacher Lisa Jean (:

The Plum Garden weekly subject planners are listed below.

Language: The children will continue to explore how to use Chinese classification words (Quantifiers) in sentences. Such as 个, 朵, 片, 棵, 张, 条, and 只. We will also learn how to use new words to make phrases. The children will learn Lunar New Year vocabularies of the lucky words, phrases, and greetings. The children will finish their four seasons’ book this week.

Math: We will learn “排顺序, 比多少 / Number order and compare the numbers”. In this chapter, the children will learn fancy ways of counting. We will learn how to count different number orders through the games. We will learn how to count backwards, skip two numbers (even and odd numbers), and we will count by fives and tens. We will play “ Fill the spoon” and “Grass-Hopper.” Starting this week, we will have math listening exercises. In each exercise, I will design a paragraph with math vocabularies. The children will learn how to listen carefully to draw a picture to answer or match the question. This exercise will improve their math vocabulary and develop their math concept with different thinking skills in Chinese.

Science: Last Wednesday, we were too busy making dumpling so we all forgot about to check our salt and ice experiment in the freezer. We will retry this hands-on science project again. We will continue to observe daily temperatures.

Art: We will continue to finish the lion making. We will make lanterns.

Social Studies and PSE: We will continue to explore the Chinese Lunar New Year celebration.
The children will learn about:

1. Lucky words and phrases and greetings.
- What are the meanings of lucky words and phrases?
- How we use those lucky words and phrases to greet people?
2. Lantern festival.
- What is the Lantern Festival?
- What is the last day of Chinese New Year?
- Why do Chinese people eat rice balls during the Lantern Festival?

Singing: We will continue to sing “Happy New Year! Wang Xiaoer / 给王小二拜年.”

P.E: We will continue to practice our lion dance.

谢谢! Thanks!
Kai