11/16 Class Review and Homework Reminder

The topic for today's class is "Family." The new characters are 几、口、有、四. You may notice that this is a modified list of vocabulary, comparing to what we have in the textbook. It was interesting for the students to notice that simple words like 几 and 口 sometimes can be tricky in this language. When we ask "How many people are there in your family?" the Chinese sentence is "你家有几口人？" This probably was the first time that some kids noticed the word 口 used as a measure word, other than its usual meaning as "mouth."

When making words out of the characters (组词), TZ said, "口渴." At least two other students didn't know what that was. When asked to explain it, TZ took out his water bottle and started drinking water! That was smart! Next, RL said, "口水." Surprisingly, there were at least three little friends shook their heads, not knowing what 口水 was. To explain this, AL said, "It's something that comes out in your month when you see yummy food!" : ) Eventually, we made up several sentences to make sure everyone understand this "mouth water"! Anyway, we had fun making sense of our new characters!

In the second half of today's class, we played a "Family Tree" game, where the kids got chance to tell us his or her family members by using manipulatives. This is the FUN part of today's class. Everyone got a turn to "show and tell!" The "survey" shows that, in our class, there are (nuclear) families as many as six people and as little as three. Welcome all! 

By using the manipulatives, we touched base on the titles of each family members including grandparents: 爷爷、奶奶、外公、外婆, uncles: 叔叔、伯伯、舅舅，aunties: 姨妈、姑姑，parents: 爸爸、妈妈，siblings: 哥哥、姐姐、弟弟、妹妹! It is indeed a cultural phenomenon that Chinese family titles are much more complex than the English ones. But fortunately, we don't need to go further on this at this stage of Chinese learning.

However, with that said, we do have a homework piece that goes along with the family titles. The students were asked to make a "My Family Tree" sheet after the manipulative game. I showed them an example that I made based on my family situation. If you could, during our Thanksgiving holiday week, please do spend some time with your child(ren) talking about your Family Tree system (I figured this would be a fun activity as well giving the family reunion theme that runs through the holidays), drawing it and marking out all the family titles for each "person" in your picture. It is highly appreciated if your child(ren) could bring it to our next class on Dec 7th.

Another component of this week's homework is the as-usual workbook exercise for lesson 9 (book A page 13-15).

11/9 Classes Review

11/9 was our second review session. We went through all the characters from lessons one to eight, as well as the children songs. We played games where two teams competed in writing characters on the board. I noticed that more than half of the students remembered how to write all the new characters on their own. Almost all of them can write a character after taking a quick look at it either in the teacher's hand, on a card, or watching others writing it side-by-side. In the second half of the class, we reviewed PinYin, where students took turns to write/trace the Pinyin of a character on a big poster. This part was fun and engaging; all the kids participated enthusiastically.

After all the reviews, we enjoyed an audio book 《大蜘蛛》.  Some of the kids commented that they are afraid of spiders, too!

10/26 and 11/2 Classes Review

Here are the new characters we've learned in the past two weeks:  王、老、师、没、秋、地、手、起。 These are pretty complicated words! I'm really impressed that most of the kids were able to write them well at our review sessions. Thank you for all the parents who spent their time facilitating their children's Chinese character writing skills at home! As a parent myself, I understand what a commitment that takes! 多谢大家课后花时间练习、复习我们在课堂上学过的内容，特别是生字。

( BTW, please feel free to let me know if you prefer to reading my posts in Chinese. Or, if you have trouble reading Chinese....I started writing this in English only because I was not sure if everyone can read Chinese here. But I guess I should have asked...  If you all are fine with both languages, I'll simply keep it as-is. )

10_26 生字

11_2生字

生字课堂练习

On Oct 26th, we played a word game and learned how to say many Halloween-related words in Chinese, such as 南瓜灯、黑猫、蝙蝠、鬼、鬼屋、巫婆、蜘蛛、骨头、面具、糖果、猫头鹰、化妆舞会、给糖或捣蛋！Students made vocabulary cards and played in teams, to try to remember/recognize/read the new words they just learned. Before the end-of-class bell rang, we only finished one run of the whole game. Many kids shorted:"Again, again!" So we knew that they enjoyed the game. :-)  

On Nov 2nd, to continue this game, I changed it a bit and used it for our review session. Students, in two teams again, took turns coming up to the white board to write the four Chinese characters we learned last week. The ones who finish fast and write well (depending on how many "good" ones) win! The kids named themselves as “南瓜队” and "苹果队". I bet they still remember the game we played last week! After the game, we learned our new characters for this week. 秋 and 起 are fairly new to all. 

If you check the textbook, you will notice the change of our new characters for lesson 8, as well as the rhyme.  In our textbook, it's a rhyme about Spring. Since we are in deep fall now, we decided to change it to a fall song. Here went the lyrics:

秋天秋天真美丽

云儿在天叶在地

小朋友们手拉手

大家一起做游戏／坐下来／站起来

( * And the tune I used is the Chinese nursery song "我爱我的幼儿园". )

To learn and feel this song, we had a small outdoor play activity in the middle of our second class. I'm glad all the kids participated in it. Thanks for our TAs, Annie and Hana, who helped out throughout the class so our fun activities are possible! 

小朋友们手拉手，大家一起做游戏

After the outdoor play, we came back in and enjoyed reading a Chinese book about Dinosaurs 《恐龙》, that held all the students' attention for the rest of today's class.