Plum Garden / 梅园书栈

梅园报晓 Plum Garden News—No.31
May 25 – May 29
Kindergarten / First grade

Greeting Parents,

Thank you all of the parents for participating in the first PTA meeting and workshop and for bringing the delicious foods. Once again, your participations are vital to us.

We already started 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:
* The 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: We will review lessons one through six. We will be doing lots of vocabularies, phrases, and sentences structure exercises. We will continue to work on the vocabulary flash cards. We will be playing a Chinese Jeopardy game to enhance the children’s language skills. The new vocabularies of the week inquiries, we will learn “Different types of transportation that we use / 我们使用不同类型的交通工具 and what makes it move? / 是什么能让它动?”

Math: We will wrap up the Geometry section “方盒，圆罐和球形 / Cube, cylindrical, and ball shape.” This week, we will start a new section “30以内的数字 / The numbers within 30.” We will learn how to count, add and subtract within 30.

Science and Life Science: We will use the shape concepts that we have learned in our last math section to make different shapes of wheels. Some wheels are round, triangular, square, hexagram, spherical, and cylindrical. Before we observe our experiments, the children will make a hypothesis on which types of wheels they think will run faster or slower and which types of wheels will veer to the side or run straight, then we prove our hypotheses by conducting an experiment.

Art: The children have drawn their art cars and made the Shu Ren School bus. We will continue to decorate our road map. This week, we will make trucks and turning wheels called “Getting a grip.”

Social Studies and PSE: Last week and this week, we are trying to discover how the world works. From the old time to the modern, from the East to the West, from the country to the city, and from the house to the school how we get around to the world by feet, bike, car, train, boat, and plane. The children have understood how transportation reduces peoples’ commute. We will continue to discuss about the first invention of the wheel and from time to time how the human innovated the wheel to make it function better.
On Thursday, June 4 is Duan Wu Jie / 端午节; also know as Dragon festival holiday. We will learn about how this holiday was brought to us (from 战国时期 / Warring States Period), a famous historian (屈原 / Qu, Yuan) and some of the special characters in Duan Wu Jie myth story (白蛇传 / White Shank). Also, I will introduce the traditional food (粽子 / Chinese Tamale) that we eat during the Duan Wu festival.

Singing: The children sang fantastically and learned and committed this song to memory incredibly fast. The new song “Fly Fast, Train / 火车快飞” only took two days for them to learn. This week, we will sing “making a airplane / 造飞机.”

谢谢! Thank you! ☺
Kai Laoshi