1/25 Class Review and The Performance Dress Code Announcement

From previous reviews, I noticed that some characters we learned in the past were well mastered by these kids, but others were not. So I designed a new "Searching for Characters" game for reviewing purpose and played it out with the students today. It turned out to be a fun/successful game. The kids enjoyed it at the beginning of the class and continued their enthusiasm for learning Chinese throughout the whole class time!

After spending about 20 minutes playing the searching game and reviewing the old characters, we learned FIVE new ones! They are: 那、个、友、好、他.  We went through each character with its sound, Pinyin, meaning and the writing instructions. At the end of the second lesson, all the students got to practice writing them. 

Last but not the least, we went to the Old Gym to rehearse our performance for the upcoming Chinese New Year celebration party. I noticed that several kids already memorized the whole song and all the movements by mostly watching the video I posted on Youtubs. Great Job and Thanks, to the motivated learners and their supportive parents!! Well done! Muy Bien! 干得好！；）

We will get one more chance of rehearsal next Sunday. Due to the situation that we really need a lot of practice and reinforcement with this performance, we, Wang Laoshi and I, decided to focus on the performance rehearsal final adjustments next Sunday (Feb 1st) for the whole class time and postpone our new lesson.  Also, we'd like to announce the following IMPORTANT REMINDERS:

For the Chinese New Year Celebration Party and our class performance, please dress your child(ren) in:

Red Dress (long or short) for Girls and White Top and Black Pants for Boys. If you have difficulty in obtaining the right color clothes or if you have any questions, please kindly let us know as soon as possible. Thank you very much for your attention!

1/18 Class Review - Numbers and Pinyin Song

How many words do you need to learn to count 1 to 100 in English? Let's see: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, night, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety, hundred. A total of 28 unique words! How about in Chinese? Let's count: 一、二、三、四、五、六、七、八、九、十 （十一 then is simply putting 十and 一together, there's no new character introduced) and ....百. That's it. Only a total of 11  characters you need to master in order to count 1 to 100 in Chinese. What a time-and-energy-saving language in counting! No wonder Chinese students are overall better at mathematics. Just kidding. ; ) 

Although today's lesson was on numbers. I really didn't see the need to teach them; almost all the students in this class already knew how to write one to ten in Chinese, except two mistakes out of nearly one hundred character practice: one 八 was like a 人，another child didn't know how to write 九. So, that was the easy part of today's class. 

 

Next, we played an indoor balloon game, instead of the planned bouncing ball activity outside due to the cold and wet weather. Thanks for our two TA jiejie, who helped with the game immensely. There were the creating and understanding of rules, numbers (for points lost and earned), physical exercise, team work, and most of all, laughter, throughout this game! The kids LOVED it so much that some of them wanted to skip the recess to continue the game! So, that was the fun part of today's class.  One educational idiom says: "Anything learned with a smile lasts for a while!"

The Chinese New Year is fast approaching. In preparing for the New Year party performance, today we had to learn the Pinyin song again with our friends from C1b. Fortunately, we got to finish teaching the Shengmu and the Yunmu parts of the song, which are the most difficult and important parts. If you wish to review the whole song at home, with all the hands and body movements, here is a simple video we put up online. It would be supper helpful if the kids can practice it outside of our class time. Thank you in advance for your support as parents!  (Sorry for the poor quality of the video given it was our very first time of doing this. After video-taping many times, this was the best one overall we could make in the given time/energy. Please use it as a general guidance rather than a perfect model. )

For homework, please finish Workbook 1 B page 16-18, lesson 12. See you next Sunday!

1/11 Class Review

Welcome back to Chinese school and our C1A class! Today was our review and rehearsal day. We began by sharing what we did during the two-week long winter break. Students talked about their trips to Disneyland, Legoland, Seaworld, supper-silly-fun-land, Lake Tahoe, Jelly belly factory,  Six Flag Discovery Kingdom, etc. Then, we talked about weather we liked to be back school or not, and why. Here are what these kids had to say:

I like to go to school again, because I like to learn and to play with my friends. 

我想上学，因为我有homework.

我不喜欢学校，因为我累死了！

我不想去学校，因为那里好玩⋯⋯Legoland那里。

我不想上学，因为学校很累，还有homework.

我喜欢上学，因为我喜欢跟朋友玩。

我喜欢上学，因为我喜欢学拼音。

我喜欢上学，因为我喜欢作业。 

I hope you enjoy reading these "honest" words as parents!

After the Share-Time on the carpet, the students teamed up in small groups, each with another friend, and wrote down Chinese characters as many as they can on a piece of paper.   Here are the final results from this "competition": 

In the second half of today's class, we reviewed Pinyin and learned the first part of our 拼音歌，with friends from C1B joining us. If you could help your kids practic what they learned today at class, singing the song and doing all those Pinyin-related movements, that would be much appreciated! We'll keep learning the rest and practicing this song in the next few weeks, until it's our time to get on the stage at our New Year Celebration party! 

12/14 Class Review & A Note on Identity & 新年快乐！

The holidays are approaching. Today was our last class at Chinese school before the winter break.

Before introducing the new characters, we reviewed what we learned last week and did a quiz. The quiz was simply focusing on Chinese character writing this time. For the total of 22 characters we tested today, there were 60% students who were able to write correctly more than half of them. That means, about half of our students are still having trouble with their Chinese writing skills. Considering the fact that the average age of this group of students is around 5, I don't see anything particularly worrisome. Although our class is titled "1st grade" at the Chinese school, we really have to compare our class to the preschool level in mainland China, where the 5 years olds are the oldest among preschoolers, not the 1st graders in public schools. In fact, our students' character recognition skills are much more advanced than their writing skills. Most of them can read all those characters now, although the writing part remains a bit challenging.

［I wrote the above on 12/14 and haven't had chance to finish the whole thing till today, the new year's eve!］

Today's lesson of our text book talks about nationalities. But I personally found it's problematic asking a young child what nationality he or she belongs to (they usually don't have clear ideas what that means at this age). Worse yet, as adults, some people are expecting simple answers from those kids! Their identity is more complex than what we assume. Thus I always encourage my own kids (now my students, too) to think themselves as at least "both", or dual-nationalities. That way, it would be natural for them, at least, to speak both languages: Chinese AND English. If I were the author of this text book, I would definitely give one more sample to the students (which is currently missing from this text book): "我是中国人，也是美国人。”  It's nothing about official nationality, or citizenship, it's more about ethnic-identity.  I always had a hypothesis that for American Chinese kids who grow up thinking they are "Americans" only, it's more likely for them to pick up English quickly and diminish their mother tongue later on, even though they were born and raised in a Chinese-speaking environment. On the other side,  naturally, no Chinese kids living in the US for their life time would think themselves as pure "Chinese." Thus, for these kids, a simple teaching on ethnic identity might be misleading indeed. 

Long story short, we learned the following four characters today: 国、也、妈、们.  Please try to help them reviewing these characters over the holiday break if you have time. (Optional, of course. )  

In the second half our class, we watched a 巧虎video, learning about PinYin.  The kids loved this! They did great job memorize the whole song right after. In January, we'll be reviewing this song a lot and rehearsal a performance that goes with it. Please stay tuned.

watching the Qiao-hu video, listening to the PinYin song

Reading the PinYin along the song

They were facing outwards when singing the song independently 

Last but not the least, THANK YOU so much for the thoughtful gifts from all you parents to us, the teacher and two TAs!!! We appreciate your warm support and kindness. It has been our pleasure and privilege to work with your lovely and wonderful kids this fall. We're looking forward to a fruitful and productive New Year of 2015! Happy New Year to you ALL!