5/14 Class Review

Happy Mother's Day to all the supportive Moms of M1 class! We dedicated the majority of our first class time to make a Mother's Day special gift to momies. We played drama by small groups, about things we like to do with mom. Then we drew pictures and wrote Chinese words on a card. The students had a lot of fun with this timing activity. And hopefully, moms who accompaied their kids to this class also got a nice break from supervising task. ;)

We then spent about 15 minutes of the second class today in the Old Gym, for a mini field trip: we went to check out all the YearBook submission from the NewStar students from K to 9th grade! It was indeed an eye-opening experience to our students, since all of them are first time participants to this annual event. Through looking at others writings and drawings, we hope the students are getting some motivation and strategies of improving their own work in the next contest.

Coming back into the classroom, we focused on Chinese character stroke order rules. We practiced identifying the very first and the last stroke of each character on a handout, following those basic rules. It is hard for anyone to memorise all the stroke orders with 100% accuracy; but fortunately, that is not our goal. We wish the students will establish a basic understanding of those rules and get the basic ones right, such as always do a horizental line from left to right and a vertial one from top to bottom.

The final quiz review handout also was distributed today. For those of you who haven't received it, it won't be too late if you come to the class on 5/21 to get it.

PinYin Song 拼音歌

This is the Pinyin Song we have been learning in the classroom.

Class Review 4/30/2017

We started today's lesson by exercising some simple dialogs in Chinese, such as "wo ma ma shi zhong guo ren," "wo baba shi yi sheng," "wo mama 也 shi zhong guo ren"......The same as last week, we did this listening and speaking exercise by playing the game "一样，不一样 (the same or not the same)," per the toy figures' gender (last time was by colors).

Then we invited students to come up to the front to recite the newly taught nursery poem "爱旅游的小蚂蚁." There were two students did it successfully and that was really cool. For those of you who haven't achieved this goal, please don't give up. You can do it within a week, if you put like ten minutes into it everyday. Your hard work will pay off once you get there! However, ideally, it should be done in a FUN way and the students need to feel that learning Chinese is not boring or too hard. If there's any negative feelings attached to this exercise at home, please find another way of doing it or email the teacher for suggestions.

Today's main lesson time was spent on learning numbers in Chinese. We counted by dribbling balls and we also practiced how to write one to ten (Chinese characters) in their correct stroke order.

The homework for this week is to finish your Year Book Contest entry. Please give it a hard thought and plan it carefully. Once started, please take your time to do a good job. Don't forget it's submission deadline is next Sunday, May 7th. Thanks to all the parents who are supportive and sacrificing your personal time to help your children learning and practicing Chinese at home!