2/15 Lesson Review & the PinYin Song Video

Today's new characters are: 来、学、她、女、了。 When we introduced the new characters, the students had fun with a new game that they kinda made it up by themselves! That is --- "hide and seek": for each new character introduced, the students looked for some simpler, already-known characters inside of it. For example, the character 来 has amazingly so many other Chinese characters hiding in it: 二、木、人、大、夫、十⋯⋯This kind of discovery is fun!

After learning the characters, we played our version of the Music Chair game, in which eight students at a time, come to the center of the classroom, looking for a character called out by the teacher. However, since there are only seven characters of each on the floor, one person who can't pick up that character at the end has to be out for another friend to come in. So we had not only the review of all the new characters we just learned, but also some cheerful nursery rhyme music and dance fun to go with it!

Following the the active game was some serious, quiet writing exercise. All the students put effort into it although obviously it was a bit challenging for some of the students. Based on the student's capacity level, some of the them finished the whole lines independently and some were okay-ed only finishing half of the lines.  Nice effort everyone!

In the second class today, we finished up our writing exercise sheet and played another character game: BINGO. I put out a dozen of characters that we recently learned on the floor. To make their own Bingo board, each student had to write nine characters of his or her choice out of the given ones. All students jumped right into it! Look how concentrated they were, writing and making their own game boards.

After making the game board. One person, either a teacher, a TA, a parent, or a kid, randomly picked a character from the floor and called it aloud. The students then played close attention to the sound and checked their board. Whoever had a bingo got a sticker as the price. We had fun playing Bingo for about 10 minutes.  

As we talked about last Sunday's school event, the Chinese New Year party, the students agreed that it was fun performing on the stage. As a review,  we "performed" the PinYin Song one more time and here's a short video of our "performance," inside the classroom of course. Have fun watching and sharing it with your family!

For the last ten minutes, we read a book that features Chinese New Year, titled "团圆 (tuan-yuan, Reunion）." Although nobody really knew what "团圆" means at the beginning, I was hoping they would understand it, even just a little bit, towards the end of the story. The story is moving and the pages are beautifully drawn. Although we didn't have enough time to finish the whole book, I was glad to notice that everyone were attentive throughout the story time, and some even wanted to stay longer for the story when we heard the school bell rang! (We will continue this book for sure next Sunday.)  

I hope you all are having a GREAT Chinese New Year celebration this week ---- a week full of joy, family reunion, delicious food, entertaining TV programs watching, laughter and happiness!!!