Administrators' Report
Heng Yin / Heng Jen

The new millennium is here. We have the opportunity to make a fresh start with our family, our work, and every aspect of our lives. One of our New Year's resolutions is to keep everyone informed of happenings in each class and in our school community through this newsletter.

We hope one of your New Year's resolutions is to dedicate more time to your child's education and to helping our schools grow. Our schools began over 20 years ago with 8 students. Now we have over 100 students (boys and girls of all grades). As a volunteer-based institution, we rely on the help of parents to support the schools in various ways. We appreciate the time many parents have contributed over the years. This semester, we encourage every parent to devote at least five hours a month to the school - whether helping out in the classroom, improving the campus, or working through the Parent-Teacher Organization (PTO).

Our Education Board (EB) has been instrumental in helping us to establish policies to manage the growing schools. One committee of the EB is drafting the schools' mission and vision statements. In the next months, we will seek input from teachers, parents, students, alumni, and community members. We hope you will participate in this exciting process.

Our PTO has gotten off to a promising start. We hope more parents from both the Boys and Girls Schools will join and make a difference. Many exciting activities are planned.

Please join us for the first PTO meeting on Thursday, January 13, 7:30-9:00 pm in the High School Library.

May we enter the new millennium with the commitment to raise and educate our children to be ethical, compassionate, and wise citizens.

Changes in the Faculty/Staff

With great reluctance we bid good-bye to Miss Lily Sun, our volunteer high school secretary, Miss Anny Sun, volunteer dorm supervisor and teacher of ESL and Math, and Ms. Patricia MacDonald, English and History teacher. We wish them well in their future careers!

We'd like to welcome Ms. Laurie Vasquez, who will be returning to teach US History, and Ms. Lucille Hui, who will be our new secretary.

Each issue will include news from some of the grades.
Books Don't Have to be Flat!
By Rebecca Lee, teacher of 3^rd and 4^th grades

Gopika and Camila decorate their history report covers with colored beads. Ru-hui glues pressed flowers onto a page, then draws a moth sipping nectar from the flowers. Cassie produces a report-in-a-can from her California History research on Famous Native Americans. Sandy has taken an in­terest in creating folded books for poetry and research projects. Gimmicky? Yes, but it inspires some great writing and love for research. "I've written seven pages and don't want to stop," exclaims Jason. "I didn't know that beavers were so interesting."

Inspired by our new reading program, Open Court's Collections for Young Scholars, the 3^rd and 4^th graders have been exploring their own potentials as creators of their lives and how they can be of benefit to each other and to the world. Plus, they are becoming inquisitive readers.

First semester, we covered the units on Risks and Consequences and Friendship. Now we are into the unit on Money and Business, which will be followed by Medicine, Imagination, and Farm and City Life.

Spring semester, I often combine my science and art classes and move them outdoors. My goal this year is to teach the gifts of nature as an experiential learning project by building an oven. We will be gathering our own clay and materials while learning about erosion, volcanoes, and conserva­tion of the earth as well as art and math. And yes, we should be able to bake our own bread!

To enhance the unit on Money and Business, we plan to create a business by building a mini-greenhouse and grow herbs and edible flowers to sell in the spring. The profits will go to a beautification project for the community and hopefully to the growth of caring children.