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).