Plum Garden / 梅园书栈

梅园报晓 Plum Garden News—No.24
March 30 – April 4
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.

Last Friday, we had Winnie (Ethan’s mother) come to the Plum Garden to talk to the students about her work. Thank you to Winnie for sharing her job experience with us.

Finally, spring is here! Last week, we were busy planting more flowers and vegetables in our garden to prepare for our next theme inquiries. I would like to thanks Oscar’s family for bringing in many different kinds of flowers for everyone. We use phone books to press those beautiful flowers for the inquiry of our next theme—Plants and us.

¡Feliz cumpleaños Cesar Chavez! March 31st is Cesar Chavez Day. We will celebrate Cesar Chavez’s birthday by planting strawberry plants in our garden. The children will learn about this Mexican farm worker hero’s story. Through the story, the children will also learn and understand about the occupation of the farm worker.

• 快乐时光——当我们同在一起的时候 / Happy hour—when we are together is our last inquiry of my beautiful family / 我美丽的家庭. When we come back to school from the spring break, we will have a completely new theme— Plants and us / 植物与我们.

Thank you Plum Garden families for sharing your family pictures. We enjoyed looking at each photo. Now, I am collecting the family recipes and I’d like to bind them into a cookbook. I still need your help to type your recipes and email them to me. If you are willing to provide more recipes, we’d appreciate it.

The Plum Garden weekly subject planners are listed below.

Language: We will continue to learn Lesson 5, 悄悄话 / Whispering. Last week, the children start a new sentence stretching exercise. They will learn how to add more words into sentences that I have given to them and without changing it. In this exercise, the children will learn how to add noun, verb, adjective, and classification words into sentences. I will send a similar homework assignment with your child’s Wednesday homework package. This exercise might take time for the children to understand the word order. If your child has problems doing this assignment by himself / herself please let me know so I can help him / her during the small curriculum time. The children will learn new vocabulary from our weekly inquiry: 快乐时光——当我们同在一起的时候 / Happy hour—when we are together.

Math: We will continue to learn “分与合 / Separation and combination.” Last week, we play a few math games. Through the games, the children have very strong concept about decomposition and synthesis within 10. This week, we will learn the sum within 10 and how many ways we can add two numbers together and get the same sum. For Example, 1+9=10, 2+8=10, 3+7=10, 4+6=10 etc.

Science and Life Science: We will continue to experiment with kitchen science. This is a three week-long science project. The inquiries of the kitchen science projects are:
•    Little seasoning master.
•    Dessert expert.
•    How to store foods
We will continue to discover our last experiment how to store foods. Last week, we put a part of bagel and yogurt in the refrigerator and a part of bagel and yogurt in our classroom. We will continue to 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: Our city project is getting ready. We are brainstorming how would a city life work, such as how to be a good citizen and how to keep our city neat and clean, and how to build a strong community, and how green can we be. Everyone’s idea will be a part of our game. We will play a game that is similar to monopoly / 大富翁.

Social Studies and PSE: We will continue to learn different occupations through parents’ careers and we’ll show demonstrations. The children will 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 “我的家 / My family” and “Spring dawn  / 春晓.” 春晓 is an ancient poem from Tang dynasty and wrote by a famous poet, Meng Haoran / 孟浩然.

谢谢! Thank you! ☺
Kai Laoshi

Here is the letter from Teacher Lisa Jean.

Greetings Friends and Families of Shu Ren English Class;

What an exciting Spring it has been – We started preparing for our celebration of the 100th day of school a week in advance focusing on our math concepts and skip counting (counting by 2′s and 5′s and 10′s).  Our first task was to read 100 words – and we accomplished this on our first try! We learned a 100′s Poem, wrote about what we would do with $100, and read many books with math concepts embedded in them. We had great fun.  I hoop you have had a chance to view the banner that Kai LaoShur and the Plum Garden Class made in the hallway!

We then focused on some math and stories and writing for St Patrick’s Day – Imagining what we would do with a pot of gold, reading a variety of books and generating complex sentences using adjectives, adverbs and prepositional phrases – and turned these sentences into our own version of a song to the tune of “The farmer in the Dell”. And we were ready to start our formal writing journals with writing pens – we used the words we generated to create our complex sentences and then wrote then with finger spaces between the words – Our next task is to correct the capitalization and punctuation…

We also are getting ready to move into our next unit of inquiry focusing on plants and life cycles – and have planted bulbs…

I will be gone for the 2 weeks around Spring Break and Teacher Jadin will be coming in to teach our class – she is my master teacher and has come in to help with some projects and overlap with me.  She will be continuing our plant unit as well as helping us edit our writing journal sentences.  Please feel free to introduce yourselves to her on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.  She has been busily preparing and gathering enriching materials for our class and is excited to be in Plum Garden this April.

I look forward to seeing you all when I return towards the end of April.

Teacher Lisa Jean (: