Please register online to attend the March 24, 2010 tour of Shu Ren International School

Please register online to attend the March 17, 2010 tour of Shu Ren International School.

Please register online to attend the March 10, 2010 tour of Shu Ren International School.

Happy Year of the Tiger!

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

Our new theme is about Communication in the Arts／画中话. Five weeks from 2/22-3/26 are the total learning weeks. The subject will focus on Language, PSE, Social Studies, PE, Mathematics, and the Arts. The central idea is that human express their feelings and ideas through the arts.
Lines of inquiry:
* The Colors of the Rainbow / 彩虹颜色
* 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

In our first inquiry, we would like to inquire about colors. Here are my questions for the children to ponder upon: What is color? How do we perceive colors? How do colors affect us? How do we mix and separate colors? Does color communicate a feeling or expression? Can color make sounds? Based on these questions, we will find out what the children want to know and what they already know about colors. We will experiment through science, art, and group project to learn colors.

Language: The first week back from the mid-winter break we learned new vocabulary from lesson four: Draw a picture / 画画—— 友 (friend), 四 (four), 可 (can), 有 (have), 地 (ground, land), 朋 (peer, friend), 草 (grass), and 张 (a piece, Chinese last name). We are going 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. This exercise might be a little challenging in the beginning, but it’s a very good strategy for practicing Chinese writing. The children will be continuing to learn how to use Chinese classification words (Quantifiers) in sentences. We will be learning new vocabularies that relate to our inquiries “The Colors of the Rainbow.” The children will be able to recognize and pronounce each color character. By the end of this inquiry, the children will know the warm, cold, primary, secondary, complementary, shade, and tint colors.

Math: We will continue to learn “greater than”, “less than”, and “equal to”. The children will use a dice to find the ‘equal to’ and ‘greater than’ and ‘less than’ numbers in different activities. They will also learn how to use color to make pattern designs to implement the ‘The Colors of the Rainbow’ inquiry. For the next four weeks, our math will 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.

Science: We will inquire into the following questions: What is color? Why doesn’t color actually exist? How do we perceive colors? How do we mix and separate colors? The children will learn from our ‘black box’ and prism experiments to understand that color originates in light and the color we see is really just a trick of the light and our eyes. We will also learn that different colors have different wavelengths. We will learn about the colors of the spectrum. The other science activities we will partake in are spinning a color wheel to explore color mixing, and using coffee paper filters and colored markers to separate color.

Art: We will make a book about colors. We will start with the primary colors, then we will move on to the secondary colors by mixing together the primary colors. The children will be able to recognize complementary colors on a color wheel. They will also know the warm and cold colors. We will make two sets of color wheels, one set will include colors with a white background and another set of colors will be with a black background. We will inquire about how a color’s saturation and hue is affected by different background colors. We will make kaleidoscope.

Social Studies and PSE: In social studies, we will start with our ‘Color Matters’ unit. We will learn about the colors in a city. How do those colors affect our daily lives and what purposes do people use color for? We will make a color survey to find out how the colors are associated with human feelings. We will also have group project “How Do Colors Affect Our Lives?”

Please register online to attend the March 3, 2010 tour of Shu Ren International School.