9/13 1st Day of School

It was nice to see so many students showed up on the first day of school!

We started our Chinese lesson right away. The students first introduced themselves briefly. The majority of students speak and hear Mandarin Chinese at home; some of them already learned to read some simple Chinese characters. It is good for the teacher to know where they are at in the beginning of the school year and then build up their learning experience accordingly.

There are two 50-minute lessons and a 10-minute recess in between each week or day of our school, from 1:30 to 3:20pm. In the first lesson today (from 1:30 to 2:20), we introduced three characters and their Pinyin, meaning and writing stocks. That will be our normal sequence each week: we usually review what we've learned and teach the new characters in the first lesson, when students are in the best learning status. Then in the second lesson, we will have more fun stuff, such as games, songs and stories. Today, we learned the Sheng-Diao-Ge 声调歌. The four tones in Chinese pronunciation is unique, comparing to English. If you can't get it right, you are hardly understood even if you get the vowels and everything else correct. So we'd like to emphasis on this on our first day of class, to give the students a fresh and long-lasting impression. Here's the whole lyrics of this song:

 中文四声很重要，
说不好会让人笑，
一声平平走，
二声上山坡，
三声下又上，
四声滑下坡。

We only touched the last four sentences today and all students practiced reciting it. Next week, when reviewing the song, we'll introduce the first two lines.

In the second lesson, we played a Pinyin game and another game called "Beat the Teacher" for learning the stroke order of each character taught. It is very important for the students to enjoy what we are learning. So games are crucial and important part of our class activities. Nothing learned without joy!

Another important event worthy mentioning today is the Parent Conference after the class. Thank you for those of you who stayed for the meeting!

Things we accomplished at the meeting:

1. Picked the Parent Representative, who is going to be Nancy Huang (Kai-di's grandma), and backed up by Lan Liang (Linda's mom).

2. Talked about things to bring to the class each time and homework, the teaching emphasis for the 1st grade this year. 

3. Parents provided their emails so I can invite them to this blog.  

4. The possibility of using iPad in the classroom for practicing character writing.  * The APP I mentioned is titled: 字宝宝笔顺⋯⋯ I believe you can download it for iPad, iphone and ipod, etc. Please download it and try it out and let me know if you don't mind your child use it in the class. Also Please bring the device to the class each time if you decide to use this method. If you have any questions, please feel free to email or ask me in person.

5. Another cool tool to help students learn Chinese, especially to boost their reading skills, is the subscription to iChineseReader. Here's the link to its website:  http://ichinesereader.com/
Let me know if you are interested in subscribing. There's a group rate for up to 36 students/families, that cost as low as $2 per month per account.

Again, feel free to ask questions. See you next week!