Newsletter #17

We had a wonderful week coming back to school! I have missed your children and I think your children missed each other and miss being at school as well. Because of that, the children were able to transition back to learning right away. Monday was tiring for many of our friends, but they are back at it on Tuesday! It was a good week of sharing what we did over the break, quick reviews as well as learning new things. Earlier this week I tried to ask them if they have forgotten all their Mandarin over break, they looked at me silly and tell me – how is that possible! The progress your children have made with their language is so exciting for me to see 🙂

I look forward to meeting many of you for our CNY Event tomorrow! Special thanks to Mandarin moms Carrie, Dana and Kristi for putting the event together 🙂

What did we learn and What will we learn?

Mandarin/Language Arts: We continue to practice our Reading Strategies – so far we have introduced and practice Making Connections and Asking Questions, and we will continue to learn about Inferring. I also tried to let the kindergarteners choose what they would like to do for Daily 5 that day (Depending on what the choices are for the day), we will review each Daily 5 is and how to transition from one to the next in the coming weeks independently. I have also prepped the children that I will start officially assessing their word wall words and high frequency characters this coming week.

Bible: We reviewed the We started our Jesus’ Ministries stories – we talked about how Jesus was baptized by John, and talked about how God says he loves His son, Jesus so much, but He send Jesus to die for us in order to free us from sins. We also talked about Jesus and his twelve disciples. We will continue to learn how Jesus lived His life or earth and what wonderful teachings He taught us. Next week we will focus on The Lord’s Prayer, and Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus.

Memory Verse/Fruit of the Spirit: These are always a little harder to understand so when you practice at home with your child, feel free to expand and help them make more connections too.

We are starting to learn about our January Fruit of Spirit: Kindness. We will be reviewing how we can be kind and safe with our looks, words, actions and gestures. We started talking about our January Memory Verse and talk about why Jesus says we have to be like little children as we enter heaven.

Math: We practiced our numbers (1-10) the school and writing numbers in Mandarin as well. We also review the concept of finding groups of 5 in numbers. We will continue to explore addition and subtraction (and the +1, -1 pattern). We will be wrapping up unit 2 soon, and take our test before moving on to unit 3. If you notice your child writing their numbers backwards, or the wrong way, try asking them, does that look right? Giving them the reminder to flip their numbers.

Exploring God’s World (Sci/SocStu): We will come back to visit our Needs and Wants Social Studies Unit later in the Spring, but for now we will pause on that and move towards learning about Motion in Science! It is an exciting unit with a lot of movements involved. We are also reviewing concepts of Self-Discipline, Responsibility and Fairness, it ties in with coming back and the children knows more about their responsibilities at this time of the year. Along with the concepts we will be talking about the 5 themes of citizenship — honesty, compassion, respect, responsibility, and courage.

Writing: This week I modeled writing my story (with full sentences). We talked about how now that we are used to sharing news/stories verbally, also through our pictures and labeling, we will start moving into writing stories in full sentences slowly but steadily. We will practice writing stories together next week before the children start to try writing their own stories in full sentences!

Play: This week, we tried to stay in Mandarin while we play. It gives me joy to see the children trying to recall words and teaching each other what words they can use. The children enjoy role playing a lot (doctors, teachers, moms and dads, pets and kids, etc.) It’s always fun to see them try to take different roles and expanding their language.

Things to Note:

Guided Reading: Book bags will be coming home for all kiddos this week! Please read the post about Guided Reading if you haven’t already. (it will give you a better idea of goals of guided reading as well as ways to support your child with the limited resources you have at home.)

Report Cards: By January 27th I will complete a report card for each child. They will be available to view online shortly after that so please watch for details on how to view it. I’m excited to see all of the progress that your children are making!

Field Trip: Our next field trip will be to the For the Kidz Gym on February 10th. You will soon receive information about the field trip and the link of waiver to sign so that your child can participate in this field trip! Our Volunteer Sign Up is full. If you didn’t get the chance to volunteer for this one, we have two more field trips coming up. Thank you for volunteering and you will hear from me soon.

Needs/Wants: If you have old baking pans *see pic below* that you are not using anymore or looking to recycle our class would love to have it! We will use it to practice Mandarin Characters with baking soda and shaving cream 🙂 Your donations will be appreciated and put into good use!

Mandarin Homework&Flashcard: Homework and Flashcard this coming week are words/phrases from U3W3. There are more words for flashcard this week, and they are all positional words. We are going to explore them the next couple of weeks with our Motions unit. Please continue to help me in keeping your children accountable for following stroke order and word proportion on Homework, and recognizing characters for Flashcard. Thank you for all you do at home!

From the Immersion Program Coordinator – On Tuesday, January 31 at 7:00 pm we will host an informational meeting for anyone interested in learning more about the Spanish or Mandarin immersion programs at ZCS. We will present an overview of what immersion looks like at Zeeland Christian, hear from an immersion parent, and open it up for a question and answer time. This meeting will be geared towards potential families but will also address many questions that existing families might have, so spread the word to parents of young children and consider joining us yourself. Grandparents who want to understand immersion education better are also invited!

What’s Coming Up?

谢谢！

－ 黎老师