Biweekly Planner November 2-18

November 2 – November 18, 2009

1st/2nd Grade Pine Garden

Greeting Pine Garden families,

Winter is coming, and we are turning to a new page of the inquiry, which is ” Let’s Celebrate! Holiday Season.” Since our class had the Halloween party together before the break, most of the students still remember what we have learned about Halloween, and it becomes easier for us to refresh memories of holidays.

After Halloween, our class raised questions about how and why people celebrate holidays, we started the discussion of the origin of holidays from books we have in our reading corner. Since we have only limited Mandarin books talking about Thanksgiving specifically, we are trying to find out how holidays relate to family, friends and food through experiences. On Wednesday, we experienced that making food is hard work and also is a great way to share our care and love of family and friends. We will bring the Tarragon vinegar we made home next Wednesday to share for Thanksgiving!

The Pine Garden biweekly review and planners are listed below:

Language/ Geography/ History/ Art

Our class started sharing some holiday experiences after the Halloween break. Some students felt interested in why people celebrate Halloween, while some 2nd graders knew that this tradition was originally from Europe. We will start discussing about why and how people celebrate holidays in different countries. The students will learn how to say and wish people happy Thanksgiving at first, and then learn some vocabulary about this holiday, such as 火鸡/ turkey, 团聚/ reunion, 节日/ holiday, 庆祝/ celebrate. Also, we are learning most holidays in Mandarin, for instance, 万圣节/ Halloween, 感恩节/ Thanksgiving, 圣诞节/ Christmas. For the coming Thanksgiving, the students are expected to talk about all food we will have on the table for our family to celebrate. We will bring back a sheet to either draw or write down what we have for Thanksgiving dinner. And then we are going to find out what other countries celebrate Thanksgiving as we do in the U.S.

Math/ Art

As our ability of adding units has improved, we’ve learned how to add digits in tens and have continued practicing. At the same time, we are learning the subject of time. We learned 长针/ long hand, 短针/ short hand, ” 几点几分/ what time is it?” and also, we learned how to count the minutes by 5’s and try to make our own clocks to figure out everything on the surface of clock. Then, we are going to learn how to do subtraction in units and tens and keep exploring more secrets about time!

Social Studies/ PES/ Art

While we were discussing why people celebrate holidays, the students were trying to find out the origin of Halloween and Thanksgiving. We found there are answers for our questions in some of the books in our reading corner. Since the students are still curious about some holidays origin other than Thanksgiving, we decided to make our own books to show people why we celebrate holidays. We are collecting more information from books and through experiences, hopefully as all the holidays go by, we will have more ideas ready to help us make the book about holidays.

P.E./ STATISTICS

We are still working on how to improve our jump rope skills and are recording the results every time we do jump rope. The students are still keeping track of their own records and tracking their improvement. After we break our own record, we will start to learn some basic ball skills, such as bouncing, catching and throwing.

Music

We’ve been learning ” 郊游/Let’s go picnic!” “火车快飞/Here comes the train!” “茉莉花/Jasmine flower,” and we’re going to learn ” Greeting song.”

Thanks! 谢谢！

Teacher Joyce 瑄瑄老师