Welcome Back !!!

Da Jia Hao!!!

Welcome back everyone.  Hopefully you had a great summer and are ready for another great year of Chinese.  We will be starting the school year with some review to get everyone back into the swing of things and dust off the cobwebs.  We will be continue our foreign language learning in Mid-Prairie with Chinese at all three elementary schools again this year.  Students will be taking a small pretest for our grant, then they can expect to go back over last years Chinese before starting our new topics.  This year we will be learning everything from saying our names in Chinese to talking about our hobbies and describing our families.  I hope you are all looking forward to this year as much as I am.

For all of you who don't have the luck to be in our classrooms this year there are lots of opportunities to learn Chinese.  The University of Iowa Confucius Institute offers an evening class for beginners and intermediate speakers.  Kirkwood Community College also offers courses in Chinese at their Cedar Rapids school.  These classes are a great chance to learn about the culture that the students are studying.  Also, you'll be able to understand them when you hear them speaking Chinese at home.  For more information feel free to email us or check out these links below.

University of Iowa Confucius Institute 


Kirkwood Community College Langauge Courses

Kalona Elementary Playground

Hey Folks,
Sorry for the sluggish posting, My laptop took a tumble off the cart and I was without a computer for a time.  Here is a quit bit of news to do with the Kalona Elementary playground for those interested.

Kalona Elementary Playground Improvement Committee
This summer we are going to install the Upper Level playground surface replacing the moldy/dirty mulch with safety rubberized tiles. It’s been a long process of rebuilding our playground to make a clean and safe environment for our children to play and get the much needed exercise.  We started September 2006 and will see the final phase being completed this summer! We are asking if you would like to be called or emailed, to volunteer some of your time to help us remove mulch out from underneath the playground equipment.  If we rake out the mulch, it would help the contractors move along faster by removing and hauling it away.  It would save time and money by doing this. We are planning to start as soon as school is out (1st part of June). We don’t have an exact start date but we can call or email to see if you are available.  If you’d like to call or email us to give us your contact information, that would be great.  Jan Knebel at 319-325-8462 janet-knebel@uiowa.edu or Kerri Bell at 319-653-6740 kbell@mid-prairie.k12.ia.us.  If you’d like to return the bottom portion instead, please send it ASAP to the school before the last day of school.  Thank you for all your help and support over the years!

Thank you,
Jan Knebel
Kalona Elementary Playground Improvement Chairperson
 
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Kalona Elementary Playground Improvement Committee
(Volunteering to help remove mulch)
 
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Wellman Elementary Chinese Newsletter

Great time at this year's final Chinese Club

Thanks to all the students, parents and teachers who have supported out Chinese clubs this year.  Everyone involved has had a great time and hopefully a lot of students went away learning more about Chinese culture.  Last week's final club was a great time with Chinese hackysack, chopstick relays and Chinese counting games.  Thanks for a great time and lets look forward to starting again next year.

Don't forget next Thursday is Chinese Club!!

Wellman Elementary Chinese Blog

Here is the this month's news from Jean Laoshi at Wellman Elementary

First Post!!!

Hello everyone!  Welcome to the first post of our Mid-Prairie Chinese blog.  There has been a lot of Chinese learning going on.  Students have learned how to introduce themselves at Kalona and hopefully been having fun in the process.  The students at Washington Township have been teaching me a great deal about all the Chinese learning they have been doing over the past few years and Jean tells me things are sailing along at Wellman.  All in all a great, if chilly spring start.

Speaking of chilly, Thanks to all the parents and students who came out to Wellamn for our Chinese club.  We learned how to make paper dragons, leaned about Chinese fireworks and wrote the Chinese character for Rabbit (since this is the year of the rabbit after all).

Here are some pictures:

Don't forget the next Chinese Club is March 31st at Washington Township.  The theme will be Chinese Games.  It is our last Chinese club of the year so don't miss it!!
再见