March 18 – March 30 Kindergarten Planners
March 18 – March 30 Kindergarten Planners
The inquiries are:
Art Can Talk too / 会说话的艺术
My Favorite Artists / 我最喜爱的艺术家
When the East meets the West / 当东方遇见西方
We would like to inquire about famous artists’ paintings and compare Eastern paintings with Western paintings. Here are my questions for the children to reflect upon: How do artists shape a story by creating and arranging elements in their painting? What is the mood or feeling of the painting? Has the story (that the painting tells) occurred in the past or present? Is the story indicating the time of day? What is the most important part of the story? Why? What is happening in the scene? What happened just before and after the action in the painting? What is the composition? Why does a composition have both positive and negative spaces? What are the Yin and Yang concepts in Chinese brush painting?
Language: We are continuing to work on, using the 31 characters that we have learned from the text, frequency words that we have read, and the vocabulary that we have explored from the inquiries to build sentences. This exercise focuses on verbal and written sentence structures. The children have made their first “I have…” poem, using 有 (have) and some of the vocabularies and phrases that they have already learned about. The children will use 爱 (love) to make “I love…” for their next poem. I have created a book of word banks that has pinyin and an English translation with each vocabulary word. It will be sent home with your child in his/her Wednesday envelope. Please keep it for you and your child as reference. I hope you find it useful. We will be learning new vocabulary that will relate to our inquiries “Art Can Talk too”, “My Favorite Artists”, and “When the East meets the West” Due to the different translations of some of the artists’ names in Chinese, we will say their names in English, unless they are a Chinese painter.
Math: We will do color pattern making—we will continue to learn how to use color to make pattern designs to implement the ‘The Colors of the Rainbow’ inquiry. After this exercise, the children will cut out their color patterns to make a piece of pattern art. Then we are about to move on to “Introduction to addition”. We will learn addition with manipulative numbers, number lines, math sentences, and math signs (plus signs, equal signs, etc.), story problems, adding groups of 10, ordinal numbers, recognizing and counting with and writing numbers 1-30, months of the year, and counting by 10’s and then 5’s. We are also getting ready to learn to count by 2’s. For our first introduction to addition, we will learn how to draw a picture to demonstrate a story problem.
Science: We will review that different colors have different wavelengths. We will continue to inquire about the following question: How do we mix and separate colors? We will spin a color wheel to explore color mixing and use coffee paper filters and colored markers to separate color. The children will understand why all the three primary colors of light (also known as additive colors), mixed together, will become white. They will also learn why all the paint pigment colors (also known as subtractive colors), when mixed together, will become dark brown or black.
Art: We have studied the painting ‘Broadway Boogie-Woogie’ by Piet Mondrian. We looked at Mondrian’s artwork and interpreted how he used lines, squares, blocks, and color to reflect the streets, buildings, and lights of Time Square in New York City. We have watched a couple of short clips of the Broadway Boogie-Woogie to see that the colors in the painting make sounds. We will make up our own sounds for each color that we see in the painting. In the next two weeks, we will look at Henri Matisse, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Diego Rivera’s paintings and some of my Chinese brush paintings. We will study Matisse’s painting—‘The red room’. We will interpret which of the objects in the painting are just red and which are painted using more than one color. We will ask and answer: what do the objects painted with many colors share in common? We will look at Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting ‘Oriental Poppies’ and my flower paintings to compare and contrast between Eastern and Western style paintings. The children will make a self-portrait with paint; two flower paintings—one with watercolor and the other with Chinese ink. They will make an art project called ‘Positive and Negative Space’. We will also use complementary colors to make clovers for St. Patrick’s Day.
Social Studies and PSE: In social studies, we will continue our ‘Color Matters’ unit. We will learn that color is an important part of human expression. We will continue to learn how colors are associated with human feelings, senses, and sound. The children will learn about why art can talk too, in their own special type of way. Some paintings represent stories that tell the time (past, present, or future), happenings, and the sequencing of events. We will learn about how the stories in paintings help us to understand the history of the past. We will have an art project for the children’s families to complete as well!
Singing: We will continue to practice singing “The Colors of the Rainbow / 彩虹的颜色.”
