10/4 Class Review

Today in class, we started with a little quiz on the ten characters we have learned so far.  Most students were able to memorize and write about six out of the ten, independently. Only very few of them, two or three, can do it all. We let the students to look at their textbooks for the difficult ones given it's the first time we are doing this (ting-xie). If the students could practice character writing at home regularly (at least once or twice per week), it would definitely help with their performance in the class if we do ting-xie again.   

The new characters taught today were: 气、太、鸟、儿。As usual, students learned the pinyin, writing strokes and word composition of each character. 

Something new we introduced today, for learning the characters, are the 声调卡, color-coded little index cards for the four tones. When learning new characters, the students were given instructions to choose a card/tone that they hear for a new character. The students usually did much better for the first and the fourth tone, but less successful for the second and third tones. We'll keep playing/practicing this game in future classes. 

In the second part of our class, we read the lesson 4 in the textbook together as a group. Then we read another piece of lyrics that is similar in content but has more words. After reading it loud for few times, we then learned the song. It's called 上学歌。 And here's a youtube link to this song: