Weekly Newsletter for 1/31/14

Dear Room 4 Families,

Gong xi fa cai! Happy Lunar New Year. I hope the year of the horse brings you and your family much joy and prosperity. Our class celebrated with various activities today. We learned about the cultural customs that the new year brings, the 12 zodiac  animals, a traditional new years song, and we worked on couplet banners to hang up in our classroom.

Thank you for your generous donations this week towards our 100th day of school and Valentine’s day party. Our class  is currently in the lead to win first place for the canned food drive. The contest ends next week, so please keep on bringing in cans so we can keep the lead!

Next week’s homework will be heavily graded on whether or not the online portion for Mandarin is submitted. If you are unable to get it to work at home, please contact me so I can have your child complete it on a computer at school.  This requires the use of a computer and is NOT iPad compatible. You will need to have the latest version of Adobe Flash installed and a microphone. If you are having difficulty getting this set up, I am happy to help you. Your child can also complete the assignment after school from my classroom computer if arranged ahead of time. The Lingt (online homework) page for next week can be found here: http://lingtlanguage.com/takeassignment/1748239103609800/

The spelling bee is next week and the words can be found here.

English Language Arts

Working on: oi/oy spelling blends, contractions, cause and effect, writing titles, proofreading, brainstorming ideas for writer’s workshop, and writing a narrative paragraph.

Next week’s spelling words: https://graceyou.com/2nd-4-3-a-trip-to-the-emergency-room/

Math
Currently on: Topic 12 – Fractions. The test will be on Monday and we will start Topic 13 – Time.

Chinese
Current Textbook Lessons: Shuang Shuang 2.9, Better Chinese Lesson Lesson 14
Things we did:

• Practiced our reading with cooperative groups to record Vokis. Individual recordings will be e-mailed to you.
• Created our own sentences describing the tails of animals with an illustration.
• Had partner activity/discussion in Mandarin about clothing.
• Focused on speaking clearly and writing in stroke order.
• Using flash cards to review and maintain our past dictation words.
• Practiced our dictation words, different variations of reading aloud, writing, singing songs, searching for our vocabulary words in our text.

Next week’s dictation words: https://graceyou.com/dictation-week-21/

Lingt (Online Homework) for next week: http://lingtlanguage.com/takeassignment/1748239103609800/

Etcetera

Room 4 could use some:

• Reams of white copy paper
• Gallon size ziplock bags
• Boxes of tissues
• A can of compressed air
• Any new or gently used items to be given away as prizes for our raffle
• Cardboard paper towel and toilet paper tubes
• Intact egg crate boxes
• Soft plastic lids from any large tubs/containers (yogurt, butter, ice cream, hummus, sour cream, etc.)

Have a great weekend!

-Ms. You