Plum Garden / 梅园书栈

The sunflower plants are taller than us

梅园报晓 Plum Garden News—No.28
May 4 – May 8
Kindergarten / First grade

Up coming events and important dates
5/5          Regional Parks Botanic Garden Field Trip.
5/12        Berkeley Fire Department visit and Demonstration at Shu Ren.
5/14        Julia Morgan Center, The Seasons Ballet Performance Field Trip.
5/19        PTA Meeting.
5/25        Memorial Day. School Closed.
**May is National Senior Citizen Month**

Greeting Parents,

As you have probably received an email from head of Shu Ren regarding the Swine Flu, we are encouraging and reminding the children to wash their hands frequently. I have shown them the proper way to wash their hands and how to cover their mouths when they are sneezing and a few other procedures to avoid getting sick. If you need more resources about and/or how to prevent the Swine flu, please feel free to contact Ping or check out the school’s bulletin for further information. Be healthy!

May has just started. The children are already excited about the up coming school events. We will have two field trips soon: visiting the Botanical Garden and watching ballet performance at Julia Morgan Center, and the Berkeley Fire Department (who will be visiting us). The following is a detailed procedure for the upcoming field trips:

Regarding our Regional Park Botanic Garden field trip, tomorrow on Tuesday, we will be leaving Shu Ren at 9:30 A.M. and arrive at the Tilden Park’s botanical garden at 10:00 A.M. The docent will give the children an hour tour in the garden. Please arrive to school no later than 8:45 A.M. Here are a few reminders for the field trip of what you should bring:
* Comfortable clothes (Please dress your child in layers)
* Comfortable shoes (Good for hiking). Since it rained this afternoon and last weekend, the ground might still be muddy or slippery, please prepare appropriate shoes for your child.
* Sun block (Please help your child apply it before the trip)
* Hat
* Lunch (Heating up needs to be done at home and the lunch needs to be packed in a bag with handles of some sort)
* Water
We will be back at Shu Ren at 1:00P.M. The children will have English lessons following the field trip.

Next Tuesday, May 12 Berkeley Fire Department will be visiting Shu Ren at 10:30A.M. The fire fighters will be showing children their rescue equipment and also giving the children a fire emergency escape demonstration. After the demonstration, the children will have a chance to see the inside of the fire engine.

Thursday, May 14 we will have a trip to the Julia Morgan Center to see a ballet performance, Tchaikovsky’s “The Seasons.” It is conducted by the Berkeley Ballet Theater. I think that this wonderful experience for the children to watch how humans use their body movements to express things; in this case, the seasons. We have learned about how artists use their paintbrushes to capture the seasonal colors and we have learned about how musicians present the seasons through different instruments to create different feelings. From different art forms, canvas to the music to the body movement, I hope these can inspire the children a little bit. The performance will start at 10:00 A.M. We will be leaving school at 9:15 A.M. and will be taking the 51 AC Transit bus to the Julia Morgan Center. Please arrive to school no later than 8:45 A.M.

For this weeks’ inquiries, we will continue to learn “Why native plants are important to their originated environment / 原生种植物对原生地带的重要性” and we will start to learn about “Flower / 花.”

Book order update: the China Sprout Company is currently making a backorder of Grandfather Tree. Due to the additional shipping charges that we will receive if both our books are shipped separately, I decided to have them shipped together.

The Plum Garden weekly subject planners are listed below:

Language: This week, we will continue to learn lesson 6: Playing games / 游戏 and we will continue to learn verbs and adjectives. We will be having word order exercises. We will also continue to learn radicals. The children will learn how to recognize the radical characters. The radical is a systematization of Chinese character. It represents a part of each word and it classifies related characters. We will have more exercises about the radical words in the mornings. We will recite the Tang poem “游子吟.” The children will also learn new vocabularies from our weekly inquiries: “Native plants are important to their originated environment / 原生种植物对原生地带的重要性 and Flower / 花.”

Math: This week, we will begin a new Geometry section “方盒，圆罐和球形 / Cube, cylindrical, and ball shape” This is a very short section. The children will learn that three-dimensional cube, cylindrical, cone, and ball shapes are the extension forms of squares, triangles, and circles. Also, learning shapes is the best way to guide children into learning to do fractions. They will understand the basic concept of the fractions through this learning section. Since we have learned how to recycle and classify our trash, we will continue to use recycling objects to learn shapes. Such as rectangle and square boxes, cans, balls, and paper cones etc… We will continue to use the Chinese traditional puzzle tool called Tangram to learn the most common shapes and how to use it to shape objects. It is a very challenging tool and it needs a lot of patient too. Through Tangrams, the children can learn how to be flexible in their thinking. Thank you Teacher Jadin for letting us to use her Tangrams.

Science and Life Science: We will review how the chlorophyll (叶绿素) function to a plant goes through the process of photosynthesis (行光合作用). We will continue to review different ways and growing styles of leaves. We will continue to learn the native California plants. We will discover different flowers and take a very close up to look at inside of the flower. We will explore the parts of the flower, such as the stamen / 雄蕊, pistil / 雌蕊, ovary / 子房, pollen / 花粉, and calyx / 花萼. The children will learn the functions of each part of a flower.

Flower collage

Art: The children will continue their flower pattern inspirations from Art Nouveau flower designs. They are almost done with their three-dimensional pattern design objects. We will be using colorful tissue paper to make flowers.

Social Studies and PSE: From our plant stem experiments, the children know that a carnation is the official flower of Mother’s Day and in addition finding particular significance in many other cultures worldwide. We will continue to discover the native plants that we can see in Berkeley or our communities, such as the California poppy (加州罂粟), Coulter’s lupine (羽扇豆也叫鲁冰花), Indian paintbrush, California blue-eyed grass (加州蓝睛草), and Redwood trees (红杉木). The children will understand how the native plants are vital to our environment and to the animals’ habituations. It’s time to call grandparents! May is National Senior Citizen month. We will learn how to show our respect to elder people. I am contacting the Berkeley North Senior Center to see is possible for us to visit the center before the end of May.

Singing: We will continue to sing “Knowing the parts of the plant/ 认识植物的身体.” Mother’s day is coming up in two weeks. We will learn how to sing “世上只有妈妈好 and 游子吟” to celebrate the Mother’s Day.

谢谢! Thank you! ☺
Kai Laoshi