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Mary Ann Durso
Recently we planned a Birthday party for ourselves and wrote our invitations in Chinese!
Pre-Kindergarten through 3rd grade learned about animals and invited one of them to the party! The whole school also studied activities and sports and chose an activity to play at their party. We also learned how to write our birth date in Chinese because the order is different from the order we use when writing the date in English. We are actually going to act out one of the parties too! It's a good thing we included a map in our invitation with directions of how to get to the party!
Some of the things we've been doing to get ready for our party are that we learned how to sing, translate, and act out the birthday song, a song about months, and a song about directions. We also read multiple birthday stories, a story about the birth of the monkey king, stories about animals, and a couple sports stories and listened really closely to them in Chinese so that we can familiarize ourselves with the language. We know that this is our opportunity to listen to the language and that listening will help us speak it. In addition, we have been watching a couple birthday movies. One is about a boy who has a party, and there is a singing dog too! Another video shows us a live Chinese birthday party so that we can compare what we do and say at our birthday parties to what Chinese students do and say at theirs.
And finally, our super principal and assistant principal filled out a survey when they were in China and we received 8 boxes of books from China! Some of the books were about animals and went along great with our Birthday theme!
We have a new tool for assessment. We now use clickers after each class and students can see exactly what they know or do not know after each lesson. These scores tie directly to each student so grades very accurately reflect exactly what a student does or does not know! We are so thankful for technology!
Kindergarten, First and Second graders are each trying to get their present, clown, or balloon to the party first because whichever class wins will get a class party. Also, Third, Fourth and Fifth grade classes are competing to get their gifts, clown, or candle to the party first so that they can earn the class party.
Kite club continues to make kites and they can finally start flying them outside! Of course, they have gone over the kite safety guidelines first.
First grade girls are working on a book for our 金鱼 jīnyú (goldfish). That way, the Alba's can read it to him when they watch him this summer. We are fortunate that we received a Donor's Choose Grant to keep his tank running. He is getting so big and we are proud of him for growing with us and staying with us another year!
Our next unit is about having a babysitter. We are going to learn food dishes that we can eat with a babysitter and we are going to learn about the different rooms in our home when we have pretend to go on a scavenger hunt with our babysitter! We are also going to be learning about our feelings and how we feel when we have a babysitter and we will be writing poems about these feelings.
Durso lǎoshī, 老师 (teacher)
Please click on Show Class Album below to view Read Aloud stories and Photos of us and our work!
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