PANDA CHINESE Our mandarin classes for the upcoming quarter will involve the theme of ANIMALS.  In this upcoming 7 week series, students will become familiar with all kinds of species.  We will learn 7 different categories of animals, featuring wild life, aquatic, birds, pets to species living in special conditions.  Some of our advanced students have already become familiar with many animal vocabularies from the past, so what we are hoping to do this quarter is to emphasize vocabulary utilization.  Deviating away from written characters.  we are hoping to begin sentence construction with our advanced students in order to built narrations.  Intermixing vocabularies from the past two quarters on food and family.  Many students should now be able to conquer short sentences.  For instance, we would like to bring to life the story of little red riding-hood.  Our students have already learned family members, clothing, facial features, and now animals, all of the past vocabularies can be featured in this story in order for students to learn to say and read the story in Chinese.  For our intermediate and beginner Mandarin students, we want to teach the root of Chinese characters, how many animals characters are driven from hieroglyphs which bears close resemblance to animal forms.  We also want to emphasis sentence usage in animal descriptions, being able to describe the size of animals, the color, the texture of its furs, its features and what it likes to eat.  We can also personify these animals to become family members and describe them in humanly fashion.  Animals are fun to learn for our K students, with the mass variety of animal puppets in the classroom, our Kinder gardeners will dive into the world of animal story telling and games.

PANDA ART This quarter we are featuring animal drawings.  Last year we learned how to contour animals using structures and muscular masses (shapes), we also explored skin texture and color.  This quarter we would like to deviate away from the nice familiar creatures and learn to draw the fierce animals of the wild.  Many wildlife’s beauty comes from it’s complexity.  In order to capture their fullness, students need to learn to pay close attention to details, every fur, every spot, even every wrinkle.  In the life of Pi, the imagery of the tiger is so vivid in its presentation, did you know the tiger was made purely through 3D animation.  In order for animators to create life, they must pay close attention to detail.  We want to train our students to pay close attention to descriptive detail in their illustrations.  This quarter we will also conduct fun projects like caveman painting where we learn about paper treatment to create aging effects.  The artist whom we are featuring for this quarter is Charley Harper.  He is a contemporary American illustrator who uses bold prints and symmetry to create animals through minimal realism.  Minimal realism is thought to utilize the least amount of content to capture the essence of the subject.  He uses shapes, color, and texture to create endless possibilities of animals, we want our students to think about why Angry Bird had been such a success in capturing the essence of birds.  Our students will create their own simple construction of complex animals.  We also want to emphasize the importance of symmetrical images, that animal faces needs to be drawn symmetrically.  In Panda Class we hope to teach our students not simply how to make an image but how to create an image.  We strive to introduce various art methods and projects to broaden our students understanding of art, in order for them to learn the endless possibilities in creating and recreating.