Bamboo Garden News, Feb. 23-27, 2009

Important dates:
03/04 Watching video of earthquake
03/06 Pre-K: Earthquake prevention

Dear parents,

Many thanks to Twig, Kai’s father, an architect with Elevation Design + Architecture in Berkeley who designed our school site. He came to the classroom to share with us about our weekly theme, my house. After we read the story of “Three Little Pigs,” Twig enhanced our knowledge about how to build a house, such as what we need to build a house and what materials prevent earthquakes and fire. After that, children worked together to try to build their house. Please enjoy our pictures.

This week, our weekly theme was “my house”:

Language: Story–Three Little Pigs.
We learned what we can use to build our house and what materials might not be good enough to build a strong house. (Straw-稻草, sticks-柴枝, or bricks-砖块). We learned four basic shapes, square (正方形zheng fang xing), circle (圆形yuan xing), triangle (三角形san jiao xing), and rectangle(长方形chang fang xing)。

Math: Shadow game
We had our four shapes cut out from white paper. There were colorful houses with the four shapes on the white board, and we tried to match our four white paper shapes with the shadows on the white board.

Art: I design my own house
We used the 4 shapes to create our own house on a board, which we imagined was the ground. After we glued it together, we painted our house as we liked. We had our living room, kitchen, and bedroom. We finished the big project day by day and finally we created the house we designed.

Social study: I don’t open the door
As we grow up, we need to learn how to protect ourselves at home. If there were no adults at home or adults were doing something else, and if someone was trying to get into our house, what should we do? We should not open the door and should tell adults as soon as possible.

Music and body movement:
叮叮叮，叮叮叮，请问你是哪一位，快快开门，快快开门，让我进屋里，对不起，不开门，对不起，不开门，妈妈不在不开门 (How we refuse to open the door when a stranger is trying to come in our house).

Next week: We will talk about earthquakes. How we can prepare and what we can do if there is earthquake. It is very important to share with children since people around us have suffered a lot from earthquakes in the past.

Thanks,
Pei
03/01/09