Newsletter #33

It’s a wonderful time of the year where we get to enjoy the wonderful nature and the children love sharing Tulip Time traditions that your families do each year 🙂 I would also like to celebrate you! Happy mothers day – I hope you enjoy a wonderful time with your family and thank you for all you do. I hope you enjoy the flowers that the children have planted (pick them up at Garden Crossings today if you haven’t already!), the little animal they made during Art, and the flower and message!

What did we learn and What will we learn?

Mandarin/Language Arts: We continue to grow and learn new characters/phrases, as well as expanding our vocabularies in our daily conversations and news sharing. In leveled reading, we continue to work on reading books that are getting harder (seeing new words, understanding what they mean, as well as practicing our understanding and reading strategies). We just learned how to read with a friend this week and it will soon be a permanent choice for our daily 5.

Bible: We talked about how Holy Spirit help guide us to know what God wants us to do (making good choices as well) and His plan for us. We talked about how sometimes even though we are doing God’s work, we might run into difficulties too. But we have to be courageous and continue to tell people His words – with God helping us, also through Holy Spirit’s guidance. We wrapped up our unit on God’s Love and reviewed the different ways Holy Spirit has helped God’s people do His work after Jesus went back to heaven. We will soon go back to Moses’ stories that we shared before Jesus’ stories! Next week we are focusing on reviewing all of the fruits of the spirit, each and every one of them and how do they look like in our daily life.

Memory Verse/Fruit of the Spirit: We are practicing our May’s Bible Memory Verse which is about going out and doing His work! We continue to talk about and discuss May’s Fruit of the Spirit – Self-Control.

We are working on practicing and memorizing the Lord’s Prayer – you can also find it on our Bible Memory Verses recording page. I encourage you to practice the Lord’s Prayer with the children at home too (when you pray/before bed, or even when you have some extra time).

Math: We continue to practice our number sense and learning how numbers work together (addition/subtraction) as well as story problems. In Kindergarten, many skills are reviewed and strategies are practiced so that the children have a solid understanding of the numbers before expanding to learning harder concepts or with bigger numbers. We are also exploring and learning 3D Shapes, identifying them while reviewing our learning on directions.

Exploring God’s World (Sci/SocStu): We have started talking about our PBL Projects which is a children based research unit on animals. We are at the researching phase – we are recalling what we already know, what we would like to know, as well as thinking of different ways that can help us find out what we would like to know. We are also learning ways to organize our thoughts on a thinking map/graph so that we do not miss anything when we are teaching our parents about our animals. The children are so excited and are loving the PBL process! 🙂 I can’t wait for them to share their learning with you!

Writing: We are in the process of finishing another small moment stories for our Critter Barn field trip. We are also starting to write some How To book and teach other to do things that we know how to.

Play: We love love animals, there was a lot of role playing school/work, as well as home this week. This week I also added some strings and beads so there are a lot of necklaces, bracelets and bookmarks going on!

Things to Note:

Memorial Day Parade: Memorial Parade is coming in 2 weeks. The instruction on the parade was send home last week – If you have any questions let me know! Please EMAIL me if you are NOT COMING!

Mandarin Homework&Flashcard: Homework that will be coming home next week will be word wall words and high frequency words from framework U6W4. Thank you for your continue work at home!

From ZCS Office – If you have not already done so, please hand in your enrollment form/packet to the school office! Thank you!

Expand(ED) Deadline Coming Soon: Please sign your child up for any Expand(ED) opportunities on this website (or search ZCS Expand(ED) online) by Friday, May 19. Opportunities include academics, sports, language, and creative arts. Camps will be canceled if there are not enough students signed up. If you have any questions, please email mklompmaker@zcs.org

From the Immersion Coordinator – All immersion parents are invited to learn more about your child’s immersion education at an Immersion Parent Round Table Discussion. While these are completely optional, I encourage anyone to join at least one meeting whether you have questions or just prefer to listen. The grade levels are just suggested ranges so that we can focus on topics which tend to be of interest to that level but don’t feel restricted by them. We will meet in the classroom at the back of the media center. Bring your lunch and your questions!

What’s Coming Up?

Specials: Monday – Spanish, Art, Tuesday – Music, Spanish, Wednesday – LAST Library time this year, PE. Thursday – Spanish.

Memorial Day Vacation/Parade (NO SCHOOL): Monday, May 29th. Kindergarteners who are interested and available that day are invited to march in the parade in downtown Zeeland!

Farmers Market Field trip: Wednesday, May 31st. (We might not make it back in time for Hot Lunch so please NO HOT LUNCH that day as well)

Save the Date – PBL Celebration: Thursday, June 1st, 2:30-3:25PM!

Prayer Requests:

We are taking on new challenges and learning to be more independent on many things in class! Prayers for courage and learning spirit as we take big steps in this last month of Kindergarten. Prayers for the children as they take on more responsibilities and ownership of their learning and the things that they do each day ?

Please pray for the learning in working together and being good group mates as we work closely with the friends in our group during PBL Project. Pray that it will be a meaningful learning experience not only to dive into the animals that God has created, but also learning how to work together, distributing jobs, helping each other, and be kind and humble when we are discussing and making decisions about our animals.

谢谢！

－黎老师