Plum Garden / 梅园书栈

梅园报晓 Plum Garden News—No.32
June 1 – June 5
Kindergarten / First grade

Important dates
6/18     Last day of school

Greeting Parents,

It is June! Another new month has begun! The transportation theme will be finishing in two and a half weeks. Last Friday, we were lucky to have a special guest; Anna Zimmermann who was here in the class, sharing her work and study experiences with us. Anna is currently working at the San Francisco Department of Environment. She speaks Mandarin very fluently. She has studied and worked for the Environmental Protection Organization in China. She visited many Chinese cities and did a lot of research about pollution and environmental protection issues. She showed us the pictures that she took from China and the Bay Area. She compared the different types of transportation between China and the Bay Area during the demonstration. She showed the children what green transportation is and how we use green transportation to reduce pollution problems and why this is important. She only spoke Mandarin during the demonstration. Her speech is very encouraging for the children to learn Mandarin. She explained to the children that she learned her Chinese in college and how she appreciates the language. She also graduated with an IB high school diploma in the United States. We enjoyed listening to Anna’s presentation and enjoyed chatting with her. She is also really impressed by how quickly the children learned Chinese and built their new vocabulary! Thank you Anna!

Party time! This month, the Plum Garden has two birthday stars—Julian and Ethan. Julian will turn seven on June 27th and Ethan will turn six on June 29th. We will celebrate their birthdays before school ends. Julian’s birthday party will be celebrated at the Plum Garden on Monday, June 8th at 2:30pm and we will celebrate Ethan’s birthday at 2:30pm on Monday, June 15th.

This week, we will review what makes vehicles move, how it functions, how can we reduce air pollution, and what green transportation is. The inquiry of this week is “Safety on the road / 马路交通安全守则.”

The Plum Garden weekly subject planners are listed below:

Language: This week, we will be starting a new lesson, lesson 7 “冬至 / the winter solstice.”
We will learn new vocabularies: 七 (seven), 冬 (winter), 那 (that, those, and how), 妈 (mother), 又 (again, also, once again, and both … and), 家 (home and family), 人 (people and person), 吃 (eat), and 年 (year, age, harvest, and New Year). We will continue to learn radicals and put sentences in order exercises. We will learn how to use adverbs in sentences, such as 也and又. We will learn about how 又 is a conjunction word and how we use it in a sentence properly and compare its’ meaning when it’s an adverb in a sentence. We will continue to learn transportation that goes by water and in the air. We will learn new vocabularies from the weekly inquiry: “Safety on the road / 马路交通安全守则.”
Math: We are starting a new section “30以内的数字 / the numbers within 30.” By the end of this section, the children will know how to count, write, compare numbers, and number orders within 30. They will know how to add and subtract and how to solve the Comparison problems within 20.

Science and Life Science: Today, we made sailboats. The sailboat also has 4 wheels on it. We were testing how the wind makes the sailboat moves. We blew on the boat to make it moves. We were also tried to observe how the sail changed the direction during the experiments. We will learn how bicycle gears work. I will use my bicycle to show the children the principle of gear rotation. The bicycle gears work as leverages. The children will learn the basic concepts about how low (smaller sizes), medium (medium sizes), and high gear (larger sizes) cause the bicycle to function differently. They will learn about why low gears are used for going uphill, medium gears are used for keeping a constant speed, and high gears are used for downhill runs. The children will use their hand to pedal the bike and discover how the different sizes of gears change their performance and how their amount of forces differs.

Art: We will continue to work on our traffic road map. Last week, we added a Bart train and dragon boats to our map. This week, we will add airplanes in the sky. We will use recycled materials to make the airplanes and rockets.

Social Studies and PSE: We will continue to learn about green transportation and how we can help reduce pollution. We will learn the road signs and what each of them mean. We will learn how to be safe on the road and why we need to follow the traffic signs.

Singing: We will continue to sing “making a airplane / 造飞机 and Taihu boat / 太湖船.”

谢谢! Thank you! ☺

Kai Laoshi