Plum Garden / 梅园书栈

梅园报晓 Plum Garden News—No.25
April 6 – April 10
Kindergarten / First grade

Greeting Parents,

Important dates
4/10    Easter egg hunt at Shu Ren Schoolyard.
4/13 – 4/17    Spring Break. Extended day care provided. Sign-up to the Camp is needed at the Administrative Office.

We had Jie (Maya’s mother) come to the Plum Garden last Tuesday to talk to the students about her work. Thank you Jie for sharing her job experience with us.

Friday, April 10 will be Good Friday. Shu Ren School will be holding an Easter egg hunt activity in our schoolyard to celebrate Easter. We will have a party at 2pm on Friday afternoon.

Spring is here! The weather is getting warmer and the air is very dry, and the sun is very bright. For your child, skin safety and not having too much sun exposure is best. I would like to remind you to prepare a hat or apply sunscreen for your child and don’t forget to prepare a water bottle too. They have at least an hour and a half hour of outdoor daily play.

Parents, please email your recipes to me at kai-yao.to@shureninternationalschool.com.
I am collecting the family recipes and I’d like to bind them into a cookbook. If you are willing to provide more recipes, we’d appreciated it very much.

Last Tuesday, each child planted his/her strawberry plant in the garden to celebrate Cesar Chavez Day and they brought home with them a strawberry plant as well. We will be observing how the strawberry plants grow each day. We hope that by the end of the “Plants and Us” theme, we can observe a complete life cycle of a strawberry.

Our new theme is about 植物和我们 / Plants and Us. Five weeks from 4/8 to 5/26 are the total number of learning weeks. The subject will focus on language, mathematics, science, social studies, personal social education, and the Arts. The central idea is how the plants and human lifestyles are interdependent.

The inquiries are:
* How do plants grow? / 植物是怎么生长的？
* Why do we need plants? / 我们为什么需要植物？
* Native plants are important to their originated environment. / 原生种植物对原生地带的重要性。
* Chinese characters that relate to the plants. / 与植物相关的汉字词汇。

In our first inquiry, we will learn about how plants grow. We have observed our classroom sweet potatoes before last Thanksgiving. We were exciting that one of the sweet potatoes is actual sprouting. It sprouted just in time for the Plum Gardeners to discover the root plant growing process. We will review our sweet potato diary and conclude the sequence of sweet potatoes’ life cycle. We will also start to introduce the parts of a plant.

The Plum Garden weekly subject planners are listed below.

Language: We will review Lesson 5, 悄悄话 / Whispering. This week, we will start lesson 6, Playing games / 游戏. We will learn 课 (lesson, class), 来 (come), 秋 (fall, autumn), 千 (thousand), 溜 (slide, skate), 滑 (slide, slip, slippery), and 真 (genuine, real, true). In this lesson, we will be starting to learn verbs and adjectives. The children will learn how to use verbs and adjectives in their writing sentences. The children will also learn new vocabulary from our weekly inquiry: How do plants grow? / 植物是怎么生长的？

Math: We will continue to learn “分与合 / Separation and combination.” This week, we will get into adding and subtracting within 20. We have worked on word problems to learn how to add and add more process or to subtract and subtract more process. We will continue to learn the sums within 10 and how many ways we can add two numbers together to get the same sum. For Example, 1+9=10, 2+8=10, 3+7=10, 4+6=10, 5+5=10 etc.

Science and Life Science: We will conclude the sweet potato sequence. We will discover a few types of common roots. We will compare their differences. We will grow Mung beans in three ways. We will grow Mung beans in three cups. We will place one cup of Mung beans in an outdoor area which provides direct sunlight, we will keep one cup of Mung beans indoors. The last cup of Mung beans will be placed indoors with a box cover and without any light source. Then, we will explore how light affects the germination process of a Mung bean.

Art: We will use oil pastels to make a vegetable drawing. We will make an Easter basket.

Social Studies and PSE: We will learn that plant and human lifestyles are interdependent. There are many kinds of plants on earth, which make our world colorful. We need to be more appreciative to the plants and cherish them. Plants have contributed greatly to human and animal habitability since many millions of years ago. We will discover why plants are so vital to human and animal lives. We will learn how we rely on the plants everyday. We will also learn the differences between herbaceous plants and woody plants.

Singing: We will continue to learn and sing “Spring dawn  / 春晓.” 春晓, an ancient poem from the Tang dynasty written by the famous poet, Meng Haoran / 孟浩然. We will learn a new song called “Knowing the parts of the plant/ 认识植物的身体.”

谢谢! Thank you! ☺
Kai Laoshi