Pine Garden Newsletter – February 1- February 26, 2010

The Pine Garden biweekly review and planners are listed below:

Language/ History/ Art
While we were discussing the cultural practices of Chinese New Year, we’ve read many stories about this holiday– Monster of Year, New Year’s Eve, Celebrating Chinese New Year, 12 Zodiac Sings, Kitchen God, Gathering. We compare some Asian holidays with Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, Kwanza, etc.. And the students held a puppet show called “12 Signs” which is based on a story we told in the class about the order and origin of Chinese Zodiac. We really enjoyed the show, so together we thought it might be a good idea to share this story to everyone in our school at CNY party.

We were trying to figure out the differences among cultures, and why or how people want to get together with family and friends on holidays. The class came up an idea about making a book to tell everybody why people celebrate holidays– the purpose of celebrating holidays. After Mr. Lee visited the class to talk about Lion/Dragon Dance and cultural perspective, we learned lots of concepts and techniques of this cultural practice and decided we want to add Dragon dance in our Chinese Zodiac play.

To prepare our play for the celebration, we reviewed all the colors we’ve learned from the past inquiry and all the animals and body parts we’ve known to figure out how or what we want our costume and masks look like.

Math
In the past two weeks, we’ve still practicing 2-digit subtraction and 1 to 10 multiplication. And we also talked about the numbers 1 to 100 to be prepared for our 100-Day celebration. We reviewed counting by 2’s, 5’s, 10’s, and more like 20’s, 50’s, counting back and forwards.
We also played gmes filling numbers in squares, very similiar to Bingo game.

Social Studies/Art
We had a great chance to look at lots of pictures to get some ideas helping us to make the masks for our play. The class wanted to make draft masks for rehearsing and showed Michele how we’d like our masks to look. And we also made a questionnaire for Mr. Lee to let him know what we are interested in and share with him how much we knew about this cultural practice.

P.E.
Since we’ve learned the most ball skills, we started separating into two teams to actually play basketball. The students are still trying to get used to all the rules and getting more practice.

Music
We learned some holiday related joyful songs– “贺年/ wishing a happy new year” “恭喜恭喜/congratulations”

Thanks! 谢谢！
Teacher Joyce 瑄瑄老师