Plum Garden / 梅园书栈

梅园报晓 Plum Garden News—No.23
March 23 – March 27
Kindergarten / First grade

Greeting Parents,

Important dates
4/13 – 4/17    Spring Break. Extended day care provided. Sign-up to the Camp is needed at the Administrative Office.

Regarding the Plum Garden blog newsletter email delay problem, Sophie (Pre-K Luca’s Mom) has fixed the newsletter email schedule setting. Thank you Sophie! The newsletter email will be sent in the next day (Tuesday) after I post the newsletter, which is Monday night. Please let me know if you still receive the late newsletter email.

Thank you Andrew (Julian’s father) for demonstrating and sharing his work experience with us. I am scheduling other parents to come and share their career with us. Our inquiry for last week is about family members’ occupation. Last week during class time, the children were brainstorm together to come out a play to demonstrate the concept of each occupation job’s descriptions.

Do you have an old phone book? Please donate your old phone book to the Plum Garden. We still need a few books for our project. We will use them to press flowers. This project will be the inquiry of our next theme—Plants and us.

Our inquiries for this week:

＊  我的房间有什么摆设和什么是我梦想中的房间? / What is the interior appearance of my bedroom and dream room?
＊  快乐时光——当我们同在一起的时候 / Happy hour—when we are together.

Ethan is this week for the family project. We will introduce his family to the class. Thank you Plum Garden families for sharing your family pictures. We enjoy looking at each photo. For the family recipes assignment, please type your recipes and email them to me. I would like to make a little cookbook. If you are willing to provide more recipes, we’d be very appreciated.

The Plum Garden weekly subject planners are listed below.

Language: We will continue to learn Lesson 5, 悄悄话 / Whispering. More lesson 5 reading materials will send with the children this Wednesday for their Wednesday homework package. Please help your child review their Chinese lessons at home. It would be very helpful for your child to review their reading log for 10 to 15 minutes everyday. The children will continue to learn how to use phrases to build sentences and add more words to stretch sentences. The children will learn new vocabularies from our weekly inquiries: * 我的房间有什么摆设和什么是我梦想中的房间? / What is the interior appearance of my bedroom and dream room? * 快乐时光——当我们同在一起的时候 / Happy hour—when we are together.

Math: We have started a new section “分与合 / Separation and combination.” Separation and combination (decomposition and synthesis) are the basic operation concepts to solve the quantity problems. We will continue to play the “Birthday Party Game” and “ Dragon” to solve the quantity problems and children will know how to use separation and combination to calculate the numbers within 10. The children will learn and understand through the game how decomposition and synthesis work. They will gain their addition and subtraction concepts from the specific examples of problems. Also, the children will learn how to use “0” and know that 0 means none. In this section, we will start work on a lot of word problems. You will also find that in your child’s homework. If your child is having trouble to do his /her math homework, please let me know so I can help him / her during the small curriculum time.

Science and Life Science: We will continue to experiment with kitchen science. This is a three weeklong science project. The inquiries of the kitchen science projects are:

•    Little seasoning master.
•    Dessert expert.
•    How to storage foods
Last week, we did a few experiments about “Solubility of salt and sugar” and “Making Jell-O.” This week in how to storage foods, we will experiment how different temperatures affect foods. We will observe how yogurt and bread change in room temperature and compare the bread to the yogurt when they are stored in the refrigerator. The children will learn from the experiments to understand how to keep food to last longer.

Art: The children will talk about their dream room and draw it. This drawing is free to mix different media. Children will learn how to draw a three-dimensional drawing in this section. We will be doing an art project—A city. Each child will use recycled material to build a city like buildings on the cardboard. Afterwards, we will combine all of the cardboard materials together to become a big city.

Social Studies and PSE: We will continue to learn different occupations through parents’ careers and we’ll show demonstrations. The children will also learn how to be a good house helper and will learn how to properly clean their bedrooms. We will focus on how the children can help their parents at home. We will discuss how we spend time together with our family.

Singing: We will sing two songs “家 / Home” and “我的家 / My family.”

谢谢! Thank you! ☺
Kai