A man is never too old to learn...Chinese Saying
活到老學到老
April 27-May 1
Transitional Kindergarten:
Kindergarten:
For English this week, students worked on reviewing their past blending letters, such as -TH, -WH, -SH, and etc. Students also participated in a group discussion about the recent heat wave, ways to keep ourselves cool, and favorite things to eat during hot days.
This week in English, students worked on blending consonant sounds such as -WH and -CH. Students came up with words such as wheel, chase, chomp, what, whisper, and change. Students also began working on sentence punctuation and grammar.
First Grade:
For English this week, students worked on reading comprehension assignments that talked about what a timeline is and how plants grow. Students had to read the article and answer question that were related to the article, such as what is a timeline, why do we use it, what do plants need to grow, and etc.
Second Grade:
For English this week, students, worked on correcting some of their past vocabulary assignments such as spelling, word usage, and sentence flow. Students also worked on reading comprehension assignments that talked about sound and plants. Students had to read the article a few times and answer questions related to the article.
Third grade: In Chinese, we had fun learning about the different planets in our universe. We learned about 水星，金星，地球，火星，木星，土星. We also learned that each of these 星球 (planet) have a specific element in their Chinese names because of their colors.
In English, we read a story about the artist Faith Ringgold. We were tested on our comprehension of the story and our understanding of different vocabularies such as inspire, juvenile, extraordinary, focus, reflect, and variety. We also classified words from previous chapters into the same group.
Fourth grade: In Chinese, we completed sentences using the new phrases we learned. These phrases include 受傷, 忍受, 退休, 打仗, and 不敢. These new phrases helped us understand the similarities Deborah Sampson and Mulan had with each other.
In English, we read a magazine article called National Ski Patrol to the Rescue. From this article we were able to learn new vocabularies such as navigate, ensure, selective, tart, and principle. Then we studied different homophones and practiced writing sentences with homophone pairs. Some of these homophone include bolder and boulder, hoard and horde, coarse and course.
April 20-24
Transitional Kindergarten: In Mandarin class this week, we learned to describe pictures in Chinese. We learned write characters: 西, 瓜, 不, 錢, 甜. We also read lesson 7: 大青蛙, The Big Frog. The highlight of this week was to sing the song 當我們同在一起 When we were together...
Kindergarten: In Mandarin class this week, we previewed the story, 我的手拿不出來了 I Can't Take My Hand Off. Students predicted the story by looking at the pictures. Everyone was wonderful imagination using Mandarin to tell the story. We then practiced reading the characters 花生米, 口水, 瓶子, 哭叫, 試, 明白, 伸進, 拿出 before we read the story. From the story we learned that we should not be greedy. In Tang poem, we focused on 尋隱者不遇.
This week in English, students worked on blending consonant sounds such as -WH and -CH. Students came up with words such as wheel, chase, chomp, what, whisper, and change. Students also began working on sentence punctuation and grammar.
First Grade: In Mandarin class this week, we previewed the story having each student to tell the story looking at the pictures. We then read and discussed the key words from the story:怪獸, 醒來, 劈啪,嚇得,聲音, 除夕,鞭炮, 年夜飯, 壓歲錢, 恭喜. We then read the story and discussed the story elements.
This week in English, students practiced correcting sentence that had many common errors in them. Some errors consisted of spelling words correctly, adding words, fixing run on sentences, and punctuation marks.
Second Grade: In Mandarin this week, we learned the antonyms:花錢/存錢, 南方/北方, 花開了/花謝了. We discussed how we going to spend $30. Everyone had great idea how to spend the money! The idiom for this week is related to spring: 春光明媚, The spring is bright and pretty.
This week in English, students worked on correcting their essays and sentence exercises, that were done before their spring break. Students also worked together in trying to help correct their fellow classmates sentences, by offering grammatical and punctuation fixes.
Third grade: In Chinese, we practiced our speech. One of the speech is about a trip to New Zealand.
In English, we learned new homophones such as loan and lone, peace and piece, great and grate. Then we practiced using both of these homophones in the same sentence to test our comprehension.
Fourth grade: In Chinese, we read about the story of Deborah Sampson, "誰是美國花木蘭". Some of the new vocabularies we learned are 退休, 打仗, 不敢, 勇氣, 當兵, and 女性.
In English, we were given context clues to figure out the meaning of each idiom. Some of our favorite idioms are "couch potato", "icing on the cake", "against the clock", and "spill the beans".
Spring Break Week 3:
Teacher Dennis:
Science:
We learned about phase changes and how certain criterias are needed to be met in order for those phase changes to occur. For example, we learned energy was needed to create heat to change the phase of milk to whipped cream and then into butter. We also learned how salt can be used to lower the freezing temperature of ice so that the bag of milk became cold enough to change into icecream. In addition, we had fun changing one material into another such as mixing flour, salt, oil, and water into play doh.
Teacher Andrew:
Culinary Arts:
Students learned basic yet very important rules when dealing in the arts of food. Students learned about the importance of keeping their hands clean, cross contamination, and how to avoid further contaminating food. Students learned how to use simple everyday household items to create tasty foods such as spam musubi, rice crispy treats, cake pops, and frozen yogurt cups. In addition, students used their inner arts, to decorate their foods, such as making star shaped rice crispy treats, colorful cake pops, snowman shaped cake pops, and using light colored fruits to decorate their frozen yogurt pops to make it more appetizing.
Spring Break Week 2:
Teacher Dennis
Engineering:
We did robotic engineering on a model of a bird. We talked about the bird and how birds fly and related it to us and maps. Through that we were able to incorporate learning cartesian coordinates and played many games and activities focused on that such as "Plane and navigator" where the navigator has to guide the pilot using cartesian coordintes to not crash. In addition the childrens learned how to program the bird with the tilt sensor to make a noise or display an image on the screen when tilted in a certain way. We also learned that we use the motion sensor to detect when the bird is tilting forward with its beak to intiate something else.
Teacher Nick
Engineering:
This week in engineering we learned about potential and kinetic energy by building cars. We also learned about the interaction between magnetic fields and electricity waves through the building of a speaker in a cup with magnets, screws, and wires. To test our creativity, we built our own castles with puzzle pieces and made music by making maracas with bottle caps, beads, and paper clips
Spring Break Week 1:
Teacher Dennis
Science:
We learned about how animation works and how people and things can move on the big screen. Through that, we learned how our eyes works and how light works with colors. We also learned how we can trick our brain into seeing colors by spinning a top that has white and black to turn off and on the color recepters in our eye. In addition, we also learned how color pigmets in markers such as black contains many other colors by chromotography using water and coffee paper filter. We saw the colors rise at different rates with the smaller pigmets at the top on the coffee filter.
Art:
The kids made a flip book which they added in images in relation to the picture of a frog. This tied in with what they learned in science about how pictures can move in movies. From that point we moved into stop motion where we make inanimate objects move by taking a series of photos and playing it back to make the objects dance around and move.
Teacher Toro
Stop Motion
For the uninitiated, stop motion animation is a film making technique that makes inanimate objects appear to move on their own. Think Gumby or Wallace and Gromit.
To make it work, you place an object in front of a camera and snap a photo. You then move the object a tiny bit and snap another photo. Repeat this process twenty to ten thousand times, play back the sequence in rapid progression, and the object appears to move fluidly across the screen.
Flip Book
Flip books offer the most versatility and creativity in hands-on animation projects because they are not limited in length or materials, as is the case with some other techniques. They're inexpensive to create with common materials and require no viewing devices. Most important, the process used to make a flip book forms the basis for all of the more sophisticated animation techniques, including filmed animation.
Teacher Andrew
Fitness:
We had fun playing dodge ball while learning about team work and cooperation. We also loved the relay games and musical chair. We definitely loved to do the egg hunt on the good Friday.