Dear parents,

This past Wednesday was a traditional Chinese festival called Mid-autumn Day which started more than a thousand years ago. During this day, Chinese people get together with their families to watch the moon and eat mooncakes. (The moon is round and full on the 15th day of each month according to our Lunar Calendar) The families also do storytelling of ancient folktales about the moon.

During class, we learned about one folktale about the moon, tasted a little bit of the mooncake and made a craft of the full moon and lanterns.

Information and Reminders:

October 19-20: teacher CEA convention, no school

Up in Lights: Evie Allen October 23-27
Please finish and send your child’s package the week before your child’s special week. During your child’s special week, it is a wonderful opportunity to have lunch with your child, bring in pets, and or share special talents your family members may have been blessed with. Just inform me ahead of time what is your plan.

From the Immersion Coordinator
What/who is add.a.lingua?
add.a.lingua is an independent business that provides support and curricular frameworks to schools with immersion programs. Being housed in Zeeland Christian, they have office space and a classroom in our school (currently used by our Mandarin K class). While our immersion program and their business grew up together working hard to develop the Spanish and Mandarin skills of our students, they now work with 17 other schools across the country as well. They provide us with valuable research-based recommendations and feedback. We are blessed to have them present in our school and to serve as a model school for them. Occasionally, they will be present in our classrooms observing, leading tours, or filming our students (with parent permission).

Curriculum

Language Arts
Daily 5
We have been practicing the first component of Daily 5 for the last couple of weeks. It is called “read to self”. Each day, we take some time to read in a quiet place and build up our stamina. We learned about 3 ways to read the book, read the picture, read the words and retell the story. By this Friday, we were able to be focus in reading for 8 minutes!

Writers’ Workshop:
We will continue our first unit called “Oral language: Building a Talking Community”. This coming week, we will use drawing to help us tell our stories. The goal of this unit is to invite children to tell stories about themselves and things they know and can do.

Math
Find numbers 1-10: Neighborhood Scene; Relate objects and numbers 6-10

Science
We will learn about the sense of touch.

Bible
Jacob, Esau, and the birthright; Jacob to Haran; Jacob in Haran

We will learn about the fruits of the sprit throughout the year. For the month of October, we will learn about the fruit of joy.

Social Studies
We will start our Project Based Learning (PBL) unit of making a map for grandparents’ day. This week, we will discuss how do we help our grandparents get around of the school on grandparents’ day.