The Krause Early Elementary School

Chinese Your Kindergarten

Dear parents, I cannot keep this secret any more. I found out who are your childs valentine during the past week and was surprised that they called their valentines in the same way (dad and mom). LOL! The past week only had four days and two of

them were exciting for kids, 100 days of school and Valentines Day. So we spent some time continuing with last weeks learning and started to introduce the concept of addition on Wednesday and Thursday. Listening/Speaking: With some more practice of fruit and vegetable words and the sentence pattern Do you like ___?, I (dont) like ___., kids were able to conduct an interview to their peers. Words such as green pepper and cucumber seemed to be harder than other ones, so we used them as attention getter. Also, we kept practicing the nursery rhyme I am a Big Apple. It is a newly developed nursery rhyme and a

little bit more challenging than the old ones created in the 60s and 70s. For this reason, I still prefer using the old ones. To help kids, I asked them to form into pairs of two and clapped their hands with each other when saying the nursery rhyme. It worked for most of them.

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The Krause Early Elementary School

Chinese Your Kindergarten

We didnt learn a new song because I wanted to make sure kids grasped what we learnt during the past week. Reading: I started to put the sentences we talked during our show and tell time into a presentation. The characters we learnt were highlighted in different colors. I hope the presentation will serve as another context for kids to review reading. In addition, we created new sentences to review the characters we have learnt so far. For example, I mixed characters and pictures to make sentences such as Monkey likes to eat banana.and Kids like to eat appleand kids were able to read them independently. Writing: We learnt to write (dadand (momthis week so that kids can make the valentines day card for you. As you can tell, writing in my curriculum has more to do with experience than academic requirement. Math: We introduced the concept of addition this week. To begin with, we talked about the meaning of 1+1=2, 1+2=3, 1+3=4...1+9=10 with cubes. It must have been a little overwhelming for some kids and I will make adjustment whenever necessary. I have been wondering what Chinese ways of teaching are more efcient than the American way since I arrived here. And I am not sure if the answer lies in teaching math just because the math we learn at school is far more difcult. One difference is that Chinese students need to recite the equations of 1+1, 1+2...1+9, etc. I will try my best to combine both ways wherever applicable. We do use arabic numerals in math. The Chinese characters are used in our worksheet just for the purpose of practice. 100 day: 100 Hershey kisses with numbers in Chinese characters on the bottom were hidden around the room. Kids had some fun looking for them and reading the numbers to me. We also found the hidden character (hundred) in the 100 chart. Show and tell: Some kids forgot to bring items to school on their days of show and tell. Each kid has a certain day of the week to do it and here is the schedule again for your reminder: Mon: Aaliyah, Abigail, Alex, Ben, Katelyn. Tue: Adriana, Alexis, Cale, Darrah, Liam Wed: Carson, Joly, Lily, Zac, Diego, Katlynn Thu: David, Ethan, Leah, Sydney, Jack, Makenna Fri: Jasper, Lucas, Maleah, Martina, James, Paige, Robert Homework: Please see the enclosed worksheet marked with homework. Winter break: This Friday to next Monday. School resumes on Tuesday. Enjoy the weekend and see your child next Tuesday.
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