9/2/14 -- 1st Day

In first class, we sang the Ni-Hao song and learned two simple Chinese characters: 大 and 小. In this song, we learned greeting phrases such as 你好、你好吗、我很好、谢谢你、再见、你叫什么名字、欢迎你，etc.

“大”

“小”

We also went through some basic classroom rules. Some of them are important to know, such as no eating food inside the classroom. So far, all the students are doing fine with all the rules we’ve discussed.

In the second session, we talked about the “four tones” in Chinese. It is extremely important to have this awareness when we start learning Chinese. For kids who do speak Mandarin at home, this comes naturally; but for kids who don’t speak Mandarin on a daily base, more practice is the key.

We also learned the PinYin and writing strokes of today's new characters. We’ll keep doing the same thing/games with all the new characters we introduce each week.

Some handouts were given in the classroom for students to practice writing skills (and in the future, too). One of the handouts is the Character Cards, some of which needed to be traced or colored; all needed to be cut out into little rectangle cards.  The hollow ones are for practicing writing skills. For those characters, we are trying our best to learn how to write. Then the solid ones are for reading/recognizing only.  Or, the optional vocabulary are for advanced students if they'd like to have fun with them.  Each student also received a small plastic zip bag for storing their cards. Please remind your child to bring this bag (with the cards inside) to the class each week.