The Krause Early Elementary School

Chinese Your Kindergarten

Dear parents, I was glad to be able to talk with a sound this week, though my voice was not back to normal. :) Another hectic week with two big events going on! Listening/Speaking: We continued to read the month book we made. The holiday words and

verb in the sentences seemed to be a little hard. We also learnt a song called My Good Mother. Reading: We learnt to recognize characters for different types of weather because they mostly originated from pictographs. These characters included rain, snow, wind, fog, sunny and cloudy. We watched ashes to help us associate these characters with real life images. Take the character (rain) for example. The dots between the vertical lines resembled rain drops from a house roof. The character (sunny) has a (sun) on its left hand side. Such an association was very helpful for children to remember the characters (I installed a software in my computer
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to show the ashes, and it was a pity that I could not upload them to our website). During our circle time, we started to read these weather characters and will keep doing it as a daily routine. We also practiced reading these characters by drawing pictures to them.

The Krause Early Elementary School

Chinese Your Kindergarten

Math: It seemed to me that most children were less familiar with subtraction than addition within 10. I taught them how to count backward from 10 to 0. My hope was that when doing addition or subtraction, they could depend less on using their ngers and other manipulatives and nish the calculation by counting upward or downward. Maybe I was too pushy because some kids were struggling during the process. I will try something else next week. Chinese culture: Chinese people were rst recorded to drink tea. Indeed, it has been a popular beverage for more than 2,000 years. This week, we watched a video on the culture of tea. Where do tea trees grow? How to process it from tea leaves? How to brew it? We compared the similarities and differences between coffee and tea. And nally we made some rose tea and drank it. Materials: Songs, videos and animated Chinese characters are updated. Other sections such as show and tell and words will be updated when I am fully recovered. Mothers Day: The Mothers Day was introduced to China over ten years ago. Personally, I knew what day it is and did something nice for my mom on that day. However, I dont feel connected with the day because it was not rooted in the traditional Chinese culture (same feelings for Christmas and Valentines Day). This is also the reason why some experts suggested the birthday of Mencius (a well-known philosopher) to be the mothers day in China. His mother was famous for moving her house three times before nding a location that she felt was suitable for her child's upbringing. Anyway... I just wanted to share with you some of my thoughts. To celebrate the Mothers Day, we made photo frames with the lovely pictures you sent and wrote I love you mom in Chinese on the back (we drew hearts for love). Although (I) was a challenging character, they all tried their best and some really did a good job. Reward: I apologize for not being able to be consistent when giving reward to kids for their completed homework or good behavior. I tried to reward them with some typical Chinese things, but kids with the same number of rewards may not receive the same kind of present due to a lack of supply. However, I will make sure they get a present for every milestone they make. Homework: Enclosed in the folder you may nd a homework to be done with only dads help. :) I found the oolong tea from a local Chinese store and hope it is more authentic. To brew it, just pour some boiling water into a cup (if you dont have a tea pot) and leave it for 2-3 minutes before drinking. It is better not to drink the tea when it is cold or before your sleep or on an empty stomach. The steps of brewing oolong tea in the video are very comprehensive, and you dont have to follow them. The lottery for next years program will be drawn after this Friday (dont know when). Will let you know the result as soon as I know it. Hope you enjoy this Mothers Day with some Chinese avor and taste!
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