Baltimore International Academy

Chinese Your First Grade

Dear parents, It has been two weeks since we communicated in week 7. Classroom management: We ate popcorn Friday afternoon because students received all green and blue for lunch time during the whole week. Congratulations to them!

After working with individual students during past two months, the behavior in our class improved a lot. I will keep working on building a positive and caring relationship with each and every student. IB and CLA: We had so much fun sharing our cultural heritage projects for the unit of Who We Are. Most of the students did an excellent job. Thanks so much for your assistance. Starting from last week, we introduced IB unit 2 - How the World Works. The central idea is our choices are key to our well-being. The lines of inquiry are: 1) Plants & animals depend on each other. 2) All living things have parts. 3) The purpose of living things features.
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These lines of inquiry may change if the rst grade teachers agree on something more applicable to our students. We grouped animals into farm animals and zoo animals and learned to read a book called Who Lives in the Farm. We also learned the song

Baltimore International Academy

Chinese Your First Grade

MacDonald Had a Farm. Kids enjoyed watching the songs video and singing along. Now that students are familiar with basic strokes and more used to writing Chinese characters, we started learning to write Chinese characters based on topics rather than the number of strokes. This week, we learned pronouns such as I, you, he, she, it, this, that and (used after I you s/he and it meaning plural form). Then we practiced by writing sentences for a booklet featuring Simpson's family. The purpose is to build up students ability to express themselves in writing. We listened to a Halloween story and applied our knowledge of characters, settings, problems and solutions to the story. Most students did a good job nding the above elements of the story. Red Ribbon Week: Since students at this age dont use drugs and alcohols, we approached this topic by introducing different kinds of emotions and what kids can do when they have negative emotions and how we can help each other out. When I saw students in a bad mood, I asked the rest of the class how they can help and they came out with many good ideas. We will continue to learn how to manage our emotions throughout the school year. Math: We kept working on subtraction within 10. We also learnt addition and subtraction fact families. First in math: I am glad to see participation from more students e.g. Edward, Jule, Blaise, etc. in the past two weeks. With joint effort, our class won The Team of the Week last week. Thank you for all your support at home. The top three players every day wore wristbands for the whole day the next day. Sometimes I forgot to ask students to return the wristbands at the end of the day. So please have your child wear the wristband to school if s/ he takes it home. Quizlet: If you havent connected to quizlet, please do so a.s.a.p. by accepting an invitation email sent from Quizlet with the subject of Invitation to Join "BIA Chinese 1A Class" on Quizlet. I will demonstrate how to use the website in class and start a reward system next week to encourage participation. Website update: The layout of http:/ /biachinese1a.weebly.com was changed. Academic materials were regrouped into Chinese Language Arts (CLA), Chinese Culture and Math. The sections of books and songs under CLA were updated. Words of farm animals were also added to quizlet. Field trip: Next Thursday, we will take a eld trip to the Harman Farms. According to my record, Anthony, King, Kaylan, Curron and Gabriels parents will be volunteering. Please let me know if I miss you so that I can assign students to chaperones. Chinese speaking: To encourage interaction in 100% Chinese, I told the students that if someone talks to you in English, you can say (I cannot understand you) or (Please speak Chinese). I will also do the same thing. Students who speak only Chinese for the whole day will be rewarded at the end of the day. Dress reminder: If weather permits, we go outside for recess everyday. Morning and evening time are getting chilly. Please dress your child appropriately for school. Have a good weekend!
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