Plum Garden / 梅园书栈

梅园报晓 Plum Garden News—No.30
May 18 – May 22
Kindergarten / First grade

Up coming events and important dates
5/19         PTA Meeting.
5/25        Memorial Day. School Closed.

Greeting Parents,

I would like to say thank you to all of the children for doing such a good job of being patient during the Julia Morgan ballet field trip. Also, thank you Teacher Lisa Jean and Maya’s father, Tony and Kieren’s mother, Heidi for helping to chaperone the field trip.

Tuesday, 5/19 at 6:30pm is Shu Ren School first PTA meeting. Thank you Oscar’s mother, Katherine for making it possible for us to have the meeting. I am encouraging the parents to participate in the meeting. Shu Ren couldn’t run without your help especially since the school is growing. Your involvements and ideas are very important to us. We will have an open house before the meeting in the Plum Garden classroom. Please come at 6:30pm to look at your child’s work. Your child will give you a brief tour according to their checklist of things to show you for open house. Our English teacher, Teacher Lisa Jean will be in the classroom as well, so please feel free to introduce yourself and chat with her. We will also have a guest speaker, Anne-Marie Pierce. She will hold an IB workshop for Shu Ren’s parents, staffs and teachers. As an IB teacher and parent (my daughter is entering the IB diploma program in Berkeley High School in the fall 2009), this is a very good opportunity for parents to understand about the IB inquiries and why Shu Ren International School chooses to be an IB school. I am looking forward to see you.

Time goes by fast. We are starting our last theme, 交通工具 / Transportation. For five weeks, from 5/19 to 6/17, will be the total amount of learning weeks for this inquiry. The subject will focus on Language, Science, The Arts, PE, and Mathematics. The central idea is about how people use many types of vehicles to get around the world.

The inquiries are
* Different types of transportation that we use / 我们使用不同类型的交通工具
* What makes it move? / 是什么能让它动？
* How does it function? / 它们有什么用途？
* What journeys have we made? / 我们计划什么旅程？
* How can we reduce air pollution? / 如何减少空气污染？
* Safety on the road / 马路交通安全守则

The Plum Garden weekly subject planners are listed below:

Language: This is the last week to learn lesson 6: Playing games / 游戏. The children will continue making flash cards for themselves so that they can study. Each morning, the children will take turns making a couple of phrases to share with their classmates. The flash cards will be sent home with the children before the summer so that they can use it to review their Chinese vocabularies at home during the summer break. We will also continue to learn radicals. We will have more exercises radical words. We will review all the vocabularies that we have learned about plants. The new vocabularies of the week inquiry, we will learn “Different types of transportation that we use / 我们使用不同类型的交通工具.”

Math: We will continue to study our Geometry section “方盒，圆罐和球形 / Cube, cylindrical, and ball shape.” We will continue to practice patterns and will use different shapes of blocks to build a favorite vehicle. Next week, we will have a completely new section.

Art: This week, we will finish Chinese flower fan painting and the children will use recycled materials to make a vehicle.

Social Studies and PSE: We will discover when people invented transportation vehicles. We will count how many types of transportation we see in our daily lives. We will learn transportation by land (car车子, truck卡车, train火车, motorcycle摩托车, and bike自行车), by water (boat船and ship舰), and air (airplane飞机, spaceship太空船, and helicopter直升机). We will learn how peoples’ lives had changed after the first vehicle was invented. The children will understand how transportation reduces peoples’ commute.

Singing: We will sing a new song “Fly Fast, Train / 火车快飞.”

谢谢! Thank you! ☺
Kai Laoshi