Bamboo Garden News, Mar. 2-6, 2009

Important date:
March 17 Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day! (Please help your children dress in GREEN. Thanks)

Dear parents,

We are almost at the end of our second theme, my family. Thanks to all the children giving me great ideas for creating more fun activities.

Here is a brief description of our third theme:

In our third theme, how we express ourselves, we are going to discover through feeling, hearing, and touching.
1. How do we express our feelings when we hear, touch, feel something?
2. After discovering how we express all the basic feelings, learning how to express ourselves appropriately is also important. For example, when I need anything from my friends, how should I express myself properly to let other people understand and feel comfortable.
3. After we learn to express ourselves properly, we will try to learn how to be a good friend.

This week:
Language: Story, 地震王国- King of the Earthquake
We tried to learn what causes earthquakes (地震,di zhen) by looking at pictures. What is a volcano? How might it cause an earthquake? What color volcano do we see in the pictures? What might happen after an earthquake?

Math:
We continued practicing the 4 shapes we learned from our “my house” project.

Music and body movement: 叮叮叮，小椅子，身体的形状, 地震来了
We continued practicing all the songs we learned before. We also had body movement, and shape of my body exercise, this week. We learned how to make the four shapes with our body with music. We also had an earthquake song. During our circle time, whenever we heard that song, what do we need to do? “Drop, cover, and hold on.”

Art: My little volcano.
After we discuss the shape of a volcano, what might come out from the it, and their shape and color, we used play dough to shape a volcano and children painted what ever they think might come out from it on the paper.

Science: WOW!!! Volcano.
We had a small experiment of making a volcano. (Thanks to Xu Lan-Tian Tian’s mom for great information.) We used 10 drops of washing soap, baking powder, warm water, vinegar, and red food coloring. We had amazing results to see a volcano. (Please see the pictures)

Social study: EARTHQUAKE…What should we do?
We watched a video of an earthquake drill. We learned to “drop, cover and hold on” when we encounter an earthquake. What do we need if there is an earthquake? An earthquake kit. What things are inside an earthquake kit?