The Krause Early Elementary School

Chinese Your Kindergarten

Dear parents, Only 26 days left for this school year. How time ies! Listening/Speaking: I tried to shut up or speak in English during our show and tell time so that kids had more opportunity to practice using the language. With the words of places we learnt last week, we used them in a

new dialogue Where are you going?, I am going to __. We spread out ash cards of these places in our classroom and pretended them as the destinations of our buses. Each bus had a driver and needed to ask the passengers they wanted to go. Hopefully this simulated scenario motivated children to use the language in a meaningful way. Starting from Thursday, we learnt six words for weather. These words included sunny, cloudy, rainy, snowy, windy and foggy. Once my instructor said that kids dont care much about weather, I was less motivated to teach weather words. :) Reading: We made a little book with words starting with the
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character . In the book, (an old man) and (an old lady) were two new words made up of old characters. They are not required. Math: With the vast majority of children being able to do addition within 10, we moved on to subtraction. Some kids were already exposed to the concept before, so

The Krause Early Elementary School

Chinese Your Kindergarten

we didnt spend too much time on explaining the idea. For Chinese students, math involves lots of rote memory of formulas and practice with applying formulas to problem solving. Maybe it is why I think once the kids understand the concept, they should avoid using manipulatives as early as possible to increase the speed of calculation (maybe I am not correct). With kids who still need help, we talked about starting to count with the bigger number and the method seemed to work. Apart from the drills we did every day, we played a board game called Sum Swamp and matching games in our center time to practice addition and subtraction skills. Chinese culture: Following the introduction of some traditional Chinese instruments, we appreciated another typical form of Chinese art, Beijing Opera. We started by learning a simple part of the song The Facial Mask of Beijing Opera. In this song, a wide range of colors used by facial masks were displayed. After it, we looked at pictures of more facial masks and talked about how we felt about different colors used in those masks. Some kids mentioned that they were afraid to see a white mask and that was the answer I was expecting because white mask symbolizes a bad person. The
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differences between other colors such as red, green, blue, yellow, black are too subtle to explain to kids although I did try to simplify them. In general, they all contain some positive characters. To have a real understanding of Beijing Opera, we watched three video clips, each respectively having a man, a woman and a kid performer. Finally we colored our own facial masks in a symmetrical way. The face changing, an important part of Sichuan Opera, was also shown as a supplemental material for appreciation. Materials: The sections of songs, videos, show and tell, words and pictures under resources of our website will be updated during the weekend, but I am not sure if I can nish it because three papers for my courses are due this Sunday. I will try my best. Homework: Enclosed in the folder you may nd two pieces of paper both titled homework. Please help your child check the weather forecast for next week and complete the report. My weekend will be packed with homework and school work, fortunately I dont have any kid. :) Hope yours is restful and relaxing!