Week of November 3-7, 2015

What an overwhelmingly awesome, exciting, and successful week at the GLOBE! Our class raised over $3000 with the whole school raised over 80k in just two short weeks!! Thank you parents for being a strong voice for education. Your support makes the difference.

Below is what we have accomplished on top of all the excitements. :) Yes, we get our work done (and have fun too)!

In our third language thematic unit, we learned about names of some body parts and language structures. Specifically head, shoulders, knees, feet, hands, head, hair, eyes, nose, and ears. The students can now tell someone if one of those body part hurts by saying, " My____ hurts, please help me!" "This is my_____." "I have # (body parts)." "Please don't touch my ________."  Our end of unit assessment is for the students to match the words to the body parts. Keep going over those vocabulary cards at home! Ask your child if he can identify body parts on a family pet or a stuffed animal for fun.

For the past two weeks, we have been looking for, tracing, and identifying two-dimensional shapes. We also looked at some paintings that are made up of lots of patterns and shapes. The students were inspired to create their own artwork.

GLOBE Trot! The students were such troopers. What a memorable mud run we will remember forever.

The students were able to share their artifacts from the Chinese restaurants and make a book with their experiences. I am blown away by some of the illustrations.

 "I went to ________ to eat." 

 "I went to _______ to eat." 

 "I ate....."

 "I even spoke some Mandarin!"

Week of October 19-23, 2015

This week we wrapped up Gravity in Science and Directional words in Math. Students experimented gravity through art, and a bouncy ball we made in class.

In language, we are wrapping out the "My Body Parts" thematic unit. Students are now able to point and name a body part (head, hair, eyes, nose, ears, shoulders, hands, tummy, knees, and feet), name how many of each body part, express if a body part hurts, and the color of a certain body part.

During language center, we continue to practice writing, recognizing sight words, reading, singing, and building sentences. The newspaper sight words scavenger hunt is a huge hit!

Next week, we will be sharing our Chinese Restaurant experience with classmates and begin to start exploring two dimensional shapes as well as motions.

Week of September 8-12, 2014

When I used to teach at a traditional public school, I was pretty relaxed on Fridays. Fridays are generally assessment days. That is the day you test the students on Math, Reading, Grammar, and Spelling. All the tests would have been printed/ copied and ready to go. All I had to do was to show up for work, pass out the test, watch my students fill in bubbles, and call it a day. Sometimes we ended the day with some sort of parties to celebrate the ones who followed directions and always turned in their work for the week. I did that for seven years, and it wasn't until now I realize what a treat it is to be able to teach and have fun. There won't be copies ready to go on my desk Friday mornings, or any morning. There are copies of songs or poems ready to be cut and pasted on children's Mandarin Journals though. Other than that, I am here to inspire and teach a lifelong skill - speaking, listening, reading, writing, and appreciating Mandarin. One of the oldest and most difficult languages in the world is taught here, and it's being done. It's rewarding to hear all the wonderful things you are saying about how much your child enjoy the new adventure. Always a treat!

This week we expanded vocabulary words in greetings, colors, fruits, and animals. Continue to work on number sequencing as well as teen numbers and counting by 10's.  In science the students planted seeds under three conditions - with sun exposure and water, with sun exposure but no water, without sun or water. The students made predictions and drawings for the outcomes.

Dot Art and Chopsticks during Literacy Center

Computer Lab

The children picked a name from a pool and each said something nice to another person. 

It was a lovely exercise where we practice to focus on the positive.

Taste Testing - Most children love grapes. 

Thanks Julie for donating organic grapes for the class! 

|WATCH| Kinder Mandarin Advice

Nervous about Mandarin Immersion? Are you new to GLOBE? Is this your first child? Is this your first child attending an immersion school? I hope the wise words below will ease some anxiety for both you (mostly just you) and your child. :)

|WATCH| How do you learn Mandarin? Speak it! Speak it! And Speak it!!

Our mornings are usually filled with lots of speaking practices. The students have been memorizing greetings, their birthdays, weathers, favorite foods and activities. There are SO MANY vocabulary words and phrases they know, but the only way to become fluent is to SPEAK THEM. It might be silly to plug words into formulas, but after awhile, the students will shift to tweak phrases...and that is really exciting! Anyhow, since we don't live in a Mandarin speaking country, we make the best use out of each other. Students are partnered up randomly and they are required to ask a set of questions and answers they are familiar with.

In this video clip, Rami and Ava ask each other what they like and do not like to do. First they interviewed each other, then they had to do an introduction. I thought the three step process was not the easiest task. Think about this, first, they have to ask the question. Second, they have to memorize it. Third, they have to ask the next question. Fourth, they have to memorize it. Fifth, they have to present it all. Oh wait, that WAS really complicated, wasn't it? And just sixty Mandarin days ago, each of them was learning how to say "ni hao!" and counting numbers to 10.

The seeds are sprouting, so keep watering.

Enjoy the clip!

Mandarin Journals are Annoying...right?

Yes. I hope your kid is annoying you with the Mandarin Journals nightly. Like Aiden here... Meanwhile, his big brother is quite cooperative.

Week of March 24-28, 2014

SPEAKING
We named our stuff animal friends, gave them birthdays, assigned their favorite and not so favorite foods. We also presented it in front of our friends. This was not as easy as I thought, but the children were able to brainstorm ideas and deliver half if not all of it correctly. As I mentioned in the video homework post, putting words together and speaking is a huge part of language development. Remember four or five years ago when your baby was just learning to speak and you filmed every precious moment? This is it. I know there might be lots of tears due to anxiety, so lots of encouragement will come in handy! 

CHINEASY
If you have not watched TED: Learn to Read Chinese with Ease, you should! 

Blurb from Amazon 

 Learn to read and write Chinese with Chineasy - a groundbreaking approach that transforms key Chinese characters into pictograms for easy recall and comprehension.

Chinese is one of the oldest written languages, and one of the most difficult to master, especially for Westerners. With Chineasy, learning and reading Chinese has never been simpler or more fun. Breaking down the Great Wall of Language, iShaoLan Hsueh draws on her entrepreneurial and cultural background to create a simple system for quickly understanding the basic building blocks of written Chinese. Working with renowned illustrator Noma Bar, she transforms Chinese characters into charming pictograms that are easy to remember.

In Chineasy, she teaches the key characters, called radicals, that are the language’s foundation, and then shows how they can be combined to form new words and even phrases. Once you’ve mastered these key characters, you can practice your skills with three stories—a fairy tale, an Asian legend, and a contemporary fable—told using the radicals.

With Chineasy, readers of all ages will be able to navigate a Chinese menu, read signs and billboards, and grasp the meaning of most articles in a Chinese newspaper. 

Below are just few of the art we have been making. Watching the characters progress is just another creative way to introduce the infamous Chinese characters. I don't think I ever thought the words were pretty until I opened this book. 

MATH
We compared numbers using numerical symbols as well as Mandarin characters. 

Week of March 3-7, 2014

Flashcards should remain in your child's reading bag. I will be going through them and marking the ones they have mastered throughout the week. 

NOT one, but two mini iPads were delivered this Wednesday! Thanks for the outpouring support from our parents! I was also so excited to purchase apps because of the iTunes credit donated. We immediately put them to use on Thursday. There are so many neat games that reinforce reading, writing, and math skills. 

Dr.Seuss' birthday celebration was a success! We read several of Dr. Seuss' books and discussed what we noticed in his poem. We all made Horton's ears, which they were so proud of wearing. We then compared and contrasted the difference between a story and a poem and an English poem and a Chinese poem written by Li Bai .

From Wikipedia - 

Li Bai (701^[1]–762), also known as Li Po, was a Chinese poet acclaimed from his own day to the present as a genius and romantic figure who took traditional poetic forms to new heights. He and his friend Du Fu (712–770) were the two most prominent figures in the flourishing of Chinese poetry in the mid-Tang Dynasty that is often called the "Golden Age of China".

Around a thousand poems attributed to him are extant, thirty-four in the canonical 18th-century anthology Three Hundred Tang Poems. The poems were models for celebrating the pleasures of friendship, the depth of nature, solitude, and the joys of drinking wine. Among the most famous are "Waking from Drunkenness on a Spring Day", "The Hard Road to Shu", and "Quiet Night Thought", which appears frequently in school texts in China today. Legend holds that Li drowned when he reached from his boat to grasp the moon’s reflection in the river.

In your child's Mandarin journal, you will find the poem "Jin Ye Si 靜夜思" by Li Bai. It's a beautifully written poem and you can even sing it. Below is the clip.  And for your own entertainment, you may watch the other one that is more suitable for adults. 

Below is a glimpse of what we were working on all week. Story problems were introduced this week...the children read the problems, drew pictures, jot down facts, and got it all done! 

Top left - Math Story Problems

Top right - Cutting out poem for the journal

Bottom left - Writing 

Bottom right - Math Story Problem

Top left - Writing

Top right - Poem on the fan

Bottom left - New carpool practice

Bottom right - Hortons working on writing

Homework + Week of February 24-28, 2014

FLASHCARDS - Please have the flashcards made this weekend and keep them in your child's reading bag. Next week I will go through all the flashcards and separate them by the ones they know or are unsure of. 

MAP testing, field trip, and lots of learning occurred this week. The students and teachers had the best cultural experience at the Synchronicity on Tuesday. The play was very well done and engaging for all. There were even some Mandarin words in the play that our children picked up, added bonus!

NEXT week we will celebrate Dr. Seuss' birthday with story telling and crafts. Remember next Friday is a teacher workday!

WRITING - The students compared the differences between a regular Chinese restaurant and a Dim Sum restaurant. They were surprised by what they found. We also wrote and illustrated our favorite Chinese and American dishes. Traditional Chinese characters require lots of rigor and patience, but we are all just having fun!

 MATH- Students played Race to One Hundred utilizing the Mandarin hundreds chart. It is not only an excellent way to practice addition and subtraction but also a way to be familiarized with the characters.