Pine Garden Newsletter – March 1 – March 12, 2010

The Pine Garden Biweekly review and planners are listed below:

Language/ History/ Art
During the past two weeks, we quickly went through all the main members and relatives on both mother and father sides: dad and mom/爸爸妈妈, granddad and grandma on both sides/爷爷奶奶, siblings/兄弟姐妹, aunt and uncle on both sides/叔叔，伯伯，姑姑，舅舅，舅妈, cousins/表兄，表弟，表姐，表妹, and discussed about relationships among one another.
Also, we’ve shared our feelings and emotions about our family members with the class, and have learned how to express ourselves through using happy, great, pleasant, joyful/快乐，高兴，开心, sad, bad/难过，伤心, to describe how we feel. And more about feelings such as miss someone/想，想念, like or dislike/喜欢，不喜欢, love/爱.

We’ve learned how to make sentences by using adjectives– a happy frog/快乐的青蛙, a beautiful butterfly/美丽的蝴蝶.

Last week, we started a long story about an immigrant father who left his own country and family, and then struggled to reestablish a new life in a different land, wishing to bring his wife and daughter to the new world. Since this story simply contains only pictures, it leaves great imaginary space for the students to really think and feel what it is about. We had a chance to interview a visiting teacher, Chen Jun, who talked about her story and introduced her family to us. Because of this, we are going to discuss about why people are willing to move to an unfamiliar place, and how do we feel when our family is far away? What do we think we can do to deal with our feelings?

Math
We started learning the concept of money and figuring out that we can make counting money easier by using the method of skipping numbers– counting by 2′s, 5′s and 10′s. And the class is still practicing addition, subtraction, and multiplication since we all noticed we need those skills to play our math games– selling and pricing things we want to sell. The students are expected to make changes.

Social Studies/Art
The chance we had talking to Teacher Chen, discussing about why she came to the States and how she misses her family in China, was inspiring to the class and became a good start to the immigrant story. If the discussion and project continues to go well, we will need to interview our parents or grandparents to be able to understand more about our family history.

P.E.
Our P.E. teacher, Teacher Novio, taught us how to play group jump-rope while reading a Chinese children’s rhyme– “xiao3 xong2, xiao3 xong2, ni3 zhuang4 ge quan! xiao3 xong2, xiao3 xong2, ni3 peng4 yi xia4 de4! xiao3 xong2, xiao3 xong2, ni3 gun3 chu qu4!” (little bear, little bear, please make a turn! little bear, little bear, touch the ground! little bear, little bear, please get out of the way!) And even on the rainy day, we stayed in our class doing stretches through games Teacher Novio taught us, and had lots of fun!

Music
We’ve learned Sweet Family/甜蜜家庭 and a song that helps us to memorize the seven continents.

Thanks! 谢谢！
Teacher Joyce 瑄瑄老师