Our focus today, again, is FOOD. The new characters introduced are: 多、两、肉、and 很。As usual, we spent the first class learning the new characters, their Pinyin, meaning, and writing. I noticed that there were always two students who seemed already knew most, if not all, the new characters. And one of them doesn't even speak Chinese often at home! Maybe we should have a parent-share time in the future to know how these kids excel in recognizing Chinese characters. I think this is important for this age group. If you can, do help your little ones to learn Chinese characters as many as possible, outside our classroom and text book content. By "learn," I mean, read, recognize, memorize, no need to write them. Writing remains a challenge for many 5-6 year olds, which is normal and shouldn't be pushed if the kids were not ready. But learning to recognize and to remember characters is much more doable and enjoyable for this age group.
Although I mentioned earlier that writing shouldn't be pushed at this age, I also noticed that at least half of this class is ready! So it has been emphasized in our in-class practice time. I always try to make sure they get some writing practice of the new characters before leaving our class.
In the second class, we shared our likes and dislikes of food items. Each student got to draw pictures of food that they like or dislike on index cards and wrote down the name of that food on the other side, in either Chinese or English. When they all finished creating the food cards, we sat down in a circle and learned about the Chinese names of some familiar food and shared our cards. Using the phrases "我喜欢吃⋯⋯" and "我不喜欢吃⋯⋯"，the students were pretty exited sharing their food preference. We will do more show-and-tell style talking exercises in the rest of the school year, to practice our oral Chinese skills.
Just a little reminder. There's no school next Sunday, 3/22. I'll see you all on the 29th instead! Have a wonderful Spring Break!
