The Krause Early Elementary School

Chinese Your Kindergarten

Dear parents, Thank you to the parents who donated Kleenex to our class. We had a good start for the third trimester of learning. Children in the morning class are making big progress in their behavior. The academic growth of some kids in the afternoon class exceeded my expectation. Listening/Speaking: We kept practicing school supply words this week. I guess the reason for our slowed down progress is that these words are not closely related to kids lives, though I considered them to be. With these words, we learned/ reviewed two sentence patterns Who has..., I have.... We played a relay game in which kids took turns to say I have ... and ask Who has.... It worked out pretty well.
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The song A Careless Drawer was also repeated this week because the difculty level of its lyrics was equivalent to that of two songs. During our show and tell time, kids were encouraged to say Who has questions? Please raise your hand. Do you like it? I like it. in Chinese. Story telling continued with practice of making predictions. Reading: We still reinforced

The Krause Early Elementary School

Chinese Your Kindergarten

learnt characters with the words and sentences I made. The assessment results showed that the gap of reading ability between kids enlarged as the number of characters we learnt increased. This is one reason that we spent more time on reviewing these characters. Another more important reason is that when combined in different ways, the old characters formed new words. An interesting example is (milk) and (milk cow). means cow or ox. We learnt in the word (grandma), but it also means milk. Kids already knew how to read these words and I just need to explain their meanings. Math: Kids practiced writing addition sentences within 5 by themselves with and without the help of manipulatives. They were asked to say these sentences a lot so that the sounds of these sentences also helped with their memory. We also tried to apply the additions we learnt. With the morning class, after ordering lunch, we added the number of ordered chocolate milk and white milk. With the afternoon class, kids added the number of girls and boys showed up every day and gave me an addition sentence before they left our classroom for dismissal. Chinese acrobatics: We watched videos of Chinese acrobatics. The one performed by boys was the winner of the Golden Clown award at the International Circus Festival of Monte Carlo in 2010. Another one by girls was chosen from CCTVs new years gala. We experienced a simple trick in some
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acrobatics and Chinese folk dances turning a big hangerchief with one nger and most kids could do it. In addition, a video of Chinese kids dance was shown to children as a reward for their good behavior. It was selected from the nalists in a national wide dance competition hosted by CCTV. They loved it so much that we watched it for two times. I promised to show them more if they do a good job in following classroom rules. Materials: Videos in the resources section of our website http:/ /chinese4kids.weebly.com was updated. I am planning to transfer all the content on www.quizlet.com to our website as my plus membership for quizlet has expired. It is also more convenient for kids to check everything we learn on one website. Hopefully I can nish it by the end of spring break. Name writing contest: Among the returned frog door hangers, the kids voted for the best name writers. The winners are: Lean, Sydney, Martina, Carson, Lucas, Maleah, Darrah and Katelyn. Each winner received a notepad with a Chinese character on the cover. CONGRATULATIONS! Homework: Your child will translate the meaning of words they read to you and you need to write down the translations. Please see the enclosed worksheet. Thank you: Special thank you goes to the parents of Diego and Ben who helped me cut out our learning materials at home. Enjoy the precious spring time!