Baltimore International Academy

Chinese Your First Grade

Happy Thanksgiving!

Dear parents, I cannot believe Thanksgiving is just around the corner. Classroom management: If you visit our classroom, you may have noticed that tables were changed to desks and two students were put into a group instead of four. The purpose was to help students better organize their belongings (pencil box, Better Chinese book, dictionary binder, Chinese/math notebook), reduce material distribution time and increase student interaction with each other. This arrangement created problems during cleanup time because children were not awarded as a whole group. I will gure out a new incentive system next week.

Last Friday, I nished decorating our classroom door. Hopefully kids will like it. :-)

IB and CLA: We reinforced the concept of carnivore, herbivore and omnivore and introduced the idea of food chain as planned. A new sentence pattern (if), then was added to the texts we read. We used the book of The Very Hungry Caterpillar to learn how to write an opinion piece. The opinion piece consists of an opinion, 1-3 reasons and a conclusion as required by the Common Core. A graphic organizer was used to help kids organize their ideas. Then we practiced writing our own opinion pieces of I Have a Good Mom and I am Thankful for xx. Most kids did a good job. The dictionary was very helpful for kids to express themselves with unlearned words. So

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Baltimore International Academy

Chinese Your First Grade

I was motivated to create more pages this weekend. :-) To grade students writing, I created rubrics and shared it with the class. The writing will be scored by neatness, punctuation, content, character writing and sentence completeness. In each criterion, score ranges from 1 to 4. We analyzed good and bad examples so that kids knew what I was looking for. We also learnt a cute song called The Finger Song in which children put up different numbers of ngers and pretended they were animals such as caterpillars, bunnies, cats, crabs and tigers. They enjoyed it. To view the songs video and English translation, please go to our class website and click songs under the tab of Chinese Language Arts. Next week, we will do some more practice to reinforce the idea of food chain and touch on healthy living so that we can wrap up this unit by the week of December 7. This units assessment is making a booklet about healthy living. We will do it in class, so you dont have to worry about it. Math: We continued working to make ten when one addend is 8 and compared efciency of counting on and making ten when one addend is 8. We also practiced adding doubles (5+5, 6+6, 7+7, 8+8, 9+9, 10+10) and solving an equation with an unknown addend (e.g. 8+6=9+?). Next week, we will solve problems with addend of 7 and share and evaluate peer solution strategies for put together with result unknown word problems. Then we will have a mid-unit assessment to wrap up Topic A. If time allows, we will introduce the rst block
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of topic B, Counting on or Taking from Ten to Solve Result Unknown Problems. Fluency contest: Winners of this week were Blaise, Jule, Sean, Madison and Nathaniel. Congratulations to them! No toys and candies at school: Students are not allowed to bring toys and candies to school. Please check your childs backpack to make sure they are not in it. I have to keep candies and toys for children till the end of the school day if I nd any, to ensure they pay full attention during our instructional time. Thanksgiving holiday: The Thanksgiving holiday will start from next Thursday. School resumes on Monday, December 2nd. Absence for holiday: If you are planning for absence for your child next week, please make sure to let Mrs. Fowlkes (and I) know in advance so that she can mark it as excused absence. Thank you to helping parents: Thank you to Marcellus mom for bringing some markers and Seans mom for bringing food to help the Philippine people. Construction paper needed: If you could bring some more construction paper to us, I would really appreciate it. Hope you and your child(ren) have a wonderful Thanksgiving break!