Plum Garden / 梅园书栈

梅园报晓 Plum Garden News—No.33
June 8 – June 12
Kindergarten / First grade

Important dates
6/11    School Picture Day at 9:30am
6/18    Kid’s Carnival–Last Day of School

Ni hao Parents,

This is the penultimate week at Shu Ren. We are still learning about the transportation. We are glad to have Julian’s grandfather (陈爷爷 / Chen Ye Ye) came to the class this afternoon. Chen Ye Ye was a bus driver. He worked at AC Transit for 33 years. He was honored by the AC Transit Company as a thirty years safe driver. He explained to the children how the public transportation changed from time to time in the Alameda County. Chen Ye Ye also gave each child a sixteen years honored safe driver badges. Thank you Chen Ye Ye for sharing his experience with the children.

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. Today, we have celebrated Julian’s birthday. We will celebrate Ethan’s birthday at 2:30pm next Monday, June 15th.

The head of school is arranging a day for picture taking to celebrate the end of our first school year at Shu Ren. We have invited a professional photographer to come and take class/school pictures this Thursday at 9:30am. We like to have every child in the pictures as possible as we can. This is the Shu Ren first year. We started with five students and now we have 23 children in the school. It would be nice to have all of the children in the pictures.

Do you have a plastic water pool, a water sprinkler, and/ or a water slide at home? May we borrow them just for a day? Thursday, June 18th will be the last day of school. We will be hosting a kid’s carnival on the schoolyard. We would like to set up some water activities for students to play. We will provide some finger snacks and we will also have music and more games for the children. Please let me know if you have any water activity supplies that we can borrow. Thanks!

We will review the last inquiry “Safety on the road / 马路交通安全守则.” The new inquiry for this week is “What journeys have we made? / 我们计划什么旅程?”

The Plum Garden weekly subject planners are listed below:

Language: We will continue to learn lesson 7 “冬至 / the winter solstice.” We have been doing the new vocabularies and phrases exercises. We will continue to learn how to put sentences in order. This is a sentence building activity that helps the children to understand Chinese grammar structures. We will continue to 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 air. We will learn new vocabularies from the weekly inquiry: “What journeys have we made? / 我们计划什么旅程?”

Math: We will continue to learn “30以内的数字 / the numbers within 30.” From doing the exercises, the children will build an understanding on how to use objects to take away the extra numbers and adding more numbers to match the exact amount. They will learn what the different meanings in Chinese between the total and ordinal number are, such as 10个 and 第10个. We will also start to learn how to solve addition and subtraction word problems within 20. By the end of this section, the children will know how to count, write, compare numbers, and order numbers within 30. They will know how to add and subtract and how to solve the Comparison problems within 20.

Science and Life Science: We have summarized our bicycle gears experiments. We all found out when we switched to a small / low gear that has shown us the pedaling is much easier and uses less strength and the gear turns around quickly. With a large gear / high gear, it has shown us that it is much harder for pedaling and uses more strength than the low and medium gears and the gear turns around slowly. For this weeks’ science experiment, we will use a balloon to push a rocket ship. We will discover how the air can force an object and make it move.

Art: We will finish our traffic road map tomorrow. This week, we will make flying saucers and rocket ships. We will also make luggage for our trips.

Social Studies and PSE: Last Friday, we had a brainstorming about summer vacations. The children have decided their own trip destinations. This week, they will learn how to plan their journeys. We will gather all the resources and information to prepare for the trip. Such as the weather report, passport, money, clothes, the notes, and overseas traveling policies etc… Here are a few questions that the children will be working on this week.
•    What kinds of transportation do they want to use for their traveling?
•    When do they want to leave and arrive?
•    Who will accompany them on their trip?
•    What do they want to see at their favorite place?
•    What things do they want to bring on their trip?

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

谢谢! Thank you! ☺
Kai Laoshi