I wish you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving break, and welcome back to Chinese school! Not sure if it was because of the weather, I felt the students were quite calm today. Not much of "classroom management" needed, really. What a nice group and a nice day!
In our review session, we played a new game today, having all the kids writing down as many Chinese characters as they can on one small sheet of paper. After three-minutes' solo work, they passed their pages to the person next to them on the right and receive one from the left. Each kid then spent another 2 minutes on adding new characters on the sheet they received......This goes on for several loops, until each page got pretty full. So, when you check your child's folder after today's class, you may see a piece of paper that full of hand-written characters by a group of kids including your own. I guess it would be fun for your child and you, the parent, together taking a look at other students' handwritings, so you'll have a better idea of what kids at this age can do and can not do in a broader range.
Unfortunately, I forgot taking pictures of our new characters of lesson 10; but anyway, they were: 工、作、生、在。Among all the example words we made out of those characters, I was surprised to realize that it's hard to explain to these kids what a 工人 is! This job category is definitely not familiar to our students in this classroom. My understanding of 工人 is more associated with industrial manufactory employees who use their hands often, in other words, is not just a "worker" in translation, but has it own subtle meaning in the context. I sensed that some kids had some misunderstanding and misuse of this word when, later on, we were talking about jobs. But honestly, I guess only life experience can correct it fully.
In the second half of today's class, we read a short story titled "People With Special Jobs." We learned some job vocabulary in Chinese such as: 医生、护士、厨师、教师、裁缝、消防员、警察⋯⋯We got to talk about what we want to be after grow up. Two kids insisted that they wanted to be "Power Rangers" when grow up, I felt short of not knowing how to translate that into Chinese. If any of you knows, please kindly let me know! ;-)
After sharing their "dreamed jobs" with the whole group, each child found a partner and exchanged information on what their parents do for living. I figured this would be a nice social interaction among our students, rather than merely an exchange of factual information. I also noticed that it was hard for most of them to immerse themselves in a pure-Chinese conversation with peers. The dependence on English is obviously there! To help with their code-switching (between English and Chinese), one simple yet efficient thing the parents can do is simply communicating with your child(ren) in Chinese as much as possible, pretending that you don't understand English at all. If your child already knew that you can speak English, you can still play this trick by saying that you have two brains, one in Chinese and one in English; and the English one quit working at home or something (you make it up!).... Have fun practicing the language at home (I know most of you can)!
After sharing their "dreamed jobs" with the whole group, each child found a partner and exchanged information on what their parents do for living. I figured this would be a nice social interaction among our students, rather than merely an exchange of factual information. I also noticed that it was hard for most of them to immerse themselves in a pure-Chinese conversation with peers. The dependence on English is obviously there! To help with their code-switching (between English and Chinese), one simple yet efficient thing the parents can do is simply communicating with your child(ren) in Chinese as much as possible, pretending that you don't understand English at all. If your child already knew that you can speak English, you can still play this trick by saying that you have two brains, one in Chinese and one in English; and the English one quit working at home or something (you make it up!).... Have fun practicing the language at home (I know most of you can)!
For homework, besides the workbook (lesson 10), please remind your child bringing to the next class the one page handout that was designed for practicing writing the four characters we learned today. Thank you!
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