The "Videos" Are Up Online Now

Recently, I discovered how to use Youtube together with this blog site! Hooray! How exiting to hear our voice here now! I'll keep uploading the files I recorded at our class meetings. Please stay tuned and enjoy!

Here're the very first three:

I'm hopping to see you all on Fri, the 19th, at 3:30, the same classroom. If you couldn't make it on time, please still check in to see if I'm still there before 4:30.....I might! We'll watch some cartoon Chinese movies and have some Chinese style snacks! So please feel relaxed and come to join the fun!

12/9 to 12/16 Class Review and Make-up Session Announcement

For the past two club meetings/classes, we reviewed all the songs, played word-search games and matching games that reinforced the body parts vocabulary. Unfortunately, due to the storm and school closure last Thursday, we had to skip one meeting last week. Then, yesterday, Tuesday, three kids were missing for various reasons. So I'm thinking of having a make-up session on this Friday, Dec 19th. The meeting time and location would be as usual, 3:30 to 4:15 pm at room 10, unless someone has a conflict and we have to reschedule accordingly. I will update any change of schedule/location promptly on this blog site. Please do check back here if you have any doubt in mind before the class time.

jian-bang肩膀  OR jian 肩

xi - gai 膝盖   OR  xi  膝

In addition to the body parts we learned previously, we added something new yesterday: 肩膀 （jian-bang, shoulder) 、膝盖 （xi-gai, knee）、脚趾（jiao-zhi, toes). A new song that should be easy for you all to grasp is Head, Shoulders and Knees. It's the same tune in English and we just translated the English words into Chinese! If you'd like to hear it on your own, here's a similar version I found online:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ts8RZj2cBA

I'll see you tomorrow!

12/2 and 12/4 Class Review - Introducing Body Parts

This week, we continued extending our animal theme to body parts. We sang the TWO TIGERS song once more, but in a creative way, adding up to four tigers and each of them had one body part missing: ears (er-duo耳朵), eyes (yan-jing 眼睛),  nose (bi-zi 鼻子) and mouth (zui-ba 嘴巴). 

The "Clench Your Fist, Open Your Fist (wo jin quan tou, da kai quan tou)" song is still a bit challenging to the kids. If you would like to spend some time practicing it after class, here's a video link to a similar version of it: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPdGSNh-E24

However, our version goes like this:

The Lyrics of Our "Fist/拳头" Song

To review the key words, we played matching games, where the students were asked to mach the sound and the meaning of each Chinese character that represents the body parts. 

After the kids mastered those basic vocabulary, I taught them a fun, traditional Chinese children's game: 指鼻子（zhi-bi-zi, meaning: pointing to your nose). It 's a game you can play almost anywhere, anytime, as long as you can find a partner to play with.  In this game, two kids team up and take turns to be the caller. The other person, the actor, needs to follow the caller's order/words, pointing to a facial feature as quickly and accurately as possible.  When playing, the caller holds one of the actor's hands and give it a gentle pat when calling out aloud the name of a facial feature. For each call, the actor's another hand needs to start from and come back to his or her nose (maybe that's why it's called "pointing to your nose"). The prompt response of the actor, to the caller's verbal calls, is the key. The laughter then comes whenever there's a mistake made by the actor! I hope you all enjoyed this game!

Nov Club Meetings Review

Happy Holidays! jie (2) - ri (4) - kuai (4) - le (4) !  It has been a busy month for everyone. Here are some of the things we've learned in November:

* The "Two Tiger (liang-zhi-lao-hu)" Song

A flash video of this song can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Nu-hF8Zg-4

Most of the students now can sing the Ha-ba-gou Song and the Xiao-lao-shu-shang-deng-tai Song well. But they need more practice on this new song, especially the last two lines of it: "zhen qi guai, zhen qi guai!" As usual, if you can sing it well in our review session in Dec, you'll get a point/sticker.

* Animal Bingo Game

Through this game, we were learning and reviewing animal characters including: 牛（cow）、猪(pig)、狗(dog)、猫(cat)、鸟(bird)、熊(bear)、狼(wolf)、兔(rabbit)、鼠(rat)、虎(tiger)、象(elephant)、鱼(fish), etc.  Through repetition, we increased the difficulty of this game over time. At first, each child was given a Bingo sheet filled with all the Chinese characters to start with, then, they were encouraged to write or glue the characters down to a blank sheet to create their own Bingo sheet. We took turns to be the caller who would read an animal flash card  aloud in Chinese that we made at the beginning of the game.  Or, sometimes we used plastic animal figures in replacement with the flash cards. That was fun!

students were given ready-to-use Bingo sheets

younger students cut and glue the characters

older students were confident practicing some writing skills

making animal flash cards

* Word Order Game  

After learning the Chinese songs, we also worked hard on reading/recognizing the lyrics word by word! In this game, each student received pieces of the lyrics and work on putting them back in order. For more advanced learners, the sentences were cut into shorter phrases and even individual characters...... But that was really hard for them to figure out the right order for all the pieces!  Hopefully, students got acquainted with the key words in those Chinese songs through playing this game. The best part though, for me, is observing the older students helping the younger ones. What a scene of Vygotshy's "social learning" taking place in our classroom!

* The Magic Clay

In the past several sessions, our club members loved creating using the "Magic Clay!" Initially, I told them to create "animals" since that was our current theme. So they made snakes, a black cat and a turtle.  Gradually, their interests shifted to making whatever attractive and doable to them, which is totally fine. We touch-based on colors vocabulary while using the clay, but for most part it was just another cool material to engage the kids in active learning! Take a look at our creations!

Strawberry 

Ice-cream Cone

Birthday Cake

* Simon Says

We learned a new song in our last Nov meeting. In this song, we got to know new words of body parts such as hands (shou 手),  figures （shou zhang 手掌）,  arms (shou bi 手臂),  legs（ tui 腿）,  head (tou 头),  eyes（ yan jing 眼睛）, nose (bi zi 鼻子),  ears（er duo 耳朵）, mouth(zui ba 嘴巴) and foot（jiao 脚）.  It sounds overwhelming learning so many new words at once.  Never mind, we'll get a lot of practice over time through songs and games! After sing the new song and learning the basic words, we played the popular English game, Simon Says, but in its Chinese version of course! The most frequent verbs we used in this game were: touch (mo 摸) and pat (pai 拍) . We also used our body to form a Chinese character:  大、小,  or 人 occasionally. We'll definitely play this game again in our review sessions. 

Happy Halloween!

Before our Oct 30th's club meeting, the kids requested that we'll learn something related to Halloween. No problem. Here you go: Halloween card game and a story book! However, after our regular review session, we barely had time to finish making both, the game cards and the book. So I guess we'll have to continue on this the next Tue. Please don't forget to bring all the game cards to the class next time, kids! 

PS. If you happen to have someone who speaks Mandarin Chinese around you, you may show your book to that person and learn how to read the story by yourself. Come to the class, read the story to us, and you'll get extra reward stickers! :-)

Our 1st Cooking Project: Pumpkin (Rice) Cakes

It's that time of the year again! Pumpkin patch field trips, pumpkin crafts and jack-o'-lanterns......So, at the Chinese Club @ Peregrine, we made some pumpkin cakes! 

As little chefs, every club member worked seriously on this project. 

We combined the traditional Chinese bakery ingredient, rice, with the popular western holiday food, pumpkin, kneading them into small dough balls. We added creative stuffing inside, chocolate chips, raisins, and even marshmallows. We used strings to make prints on them, and finally, them got steamed! Uh-oh, however, the marshmallow ones were not that successful (we should have thought about that marshmallows tend to expand in heat....so that broke the skin of the dough). It's like an experiment, isn't it? But regardless, they tested yummy and sweet! Here are some pictures we took on our cooking day. I hope you all enjoyed this little treat!  

Let's Make Some Pumpkin Cakes

Tomorrow, Oct 28, we'll have our first cooking project with our Chinese club students. And the food we'll cook is....Pumpkin Cakes!

Here's a small language lesson.  The Chinese word for pumpkin is 南瓜（nan-gua), literally translated, South-Squash.  In Chinese, we actually have two kinds of melon/squash/gourd that are named after direction words: South (南 nan ) and West (西 xi). The character 瓜（gua）could be used for melon, squash, or gourd, usually depending on if it's a fruit or vegetable or both...... It was believed that pumpkin was introduced into China from South America long time ago. That's why it was named by the Chinese as "nan-gua" (南瓜, South-Squash). Can you guess what is a "xi-gua" (西瓜, or West - Melon)? We'll talk about it when we do the hands-on cooking tomorrow!  

The cooking instructions and recipe are attached here for your reference:

Pumpkin Cake   南  瓜  饼 （nan – gua – bing）

Ingredients  (to make 20-25)

Sweet/Sticky rice flour            2.5 cups
Sugar                                        0.5 cup

Sweet red bean paste                5 oz

Canned pumpkin puree            15 oz

Vegetable oil                            1 teaspoon

Directions

1)    Make the dough: place the flour and sugar in a mixing bowl, add the vegetable oil and slowly add in the pumpkin puree, stirring with a wooden spoon or by hands, until the dough feels thoroughly mixed, soft but non-sticky.  Knead the dough for about 5 minutes and let it rest for 3-5 minutes.

2)    Make the cake: divide the dough into small equal pieces, roll it into a ball with the palms of your hands, and press your thumb into the center of the dough to form a little nest. Place about 1/3 teaspoon red bean paste filling into the nest, gentally draw the edges of the dough up to enclose it, hiding al the red bean paste. Roll it gently between your palms to make a smooth ball. Use a string to gently make pumpkin prints on the ball.

3)    Cooking: place the cake onto a parchment paper lined in the steamer, as many that will fit without touching each other. Pour enough water into a sauce pan and bring to a boil. Set the steamer filled with cakes over the sauce pan. Cover the lid and steam the cakes for about 6-7 minutes. Turn off the heat and wait for half minute (without opening the lid). Serve when still warm but not hot.

Reminders

• Wash your hands thoroughly before making the cakes.
• Since sticky rice (flour) is extremely glutinous, all, especially kids and seniors, should watch out for choking, particularly when eating hot.
• Store ingredients in the refrigerator and freeze what you can’t eat/cook. 

"Little Mouse Goes On Lamp-stand" Song

 So here comes our next Chinese nursery rhyme,  小老鼠上灯台 （xiao-lao-shu-shang-deng-tai), little mouse goes on a lamp-stand!  I'm attaching the lyrics and translation as follows. If you wish to listen to it, please paste-and-copy the Chinese words above and do an online search yourself. I'm sure you'll find more than one video/audio links to this famous Chinese children's song.

We introduced it the first time on Oct 23. We'll continue reviewing and singing it for the rest of Oct class meetings! Have fun learning a new song in Chinese!

 xiao   lao   shu, shang  deng  tai  
小老鼠，上灯台(the little mouse, climbed up the lamp-stand)
tou   you   chi,  xia  bu   lai
偷油吃，下不来(stealthily ate oil, was unable to get down)
miao  miao miao,  mao   lai    le
喵 喵 喵，猫来了(meow, meow, meow, here came the cat)
ji    li   gu   lu  gun xia lai
叽里咕噜滚下来(ji-li-gu-lu down fell the mouse)

Week 10/13-10/24 Class Theme and Activities

 We are continuing our theme of "Animals" in our meetings for these two weeks.

On Tue, Oct the 14th, we introduced the incredible ancient Chinese puzzle: "Qi Qiao Ban (Pronunciation: chee-chiao-baann, or, Tangram in English)." Literarily translated, Qi Qiao Ban means "seven versatile boards." It is hard to imagine how versatile they are until you give it a try! Of course, the boards themselves won't be so great without your effort and wise input; it is challenging at times. But it turned out that all the kids in our club enjoyed playing with it. Out of these seven small boards, we made all kinds of animals: cat, fish, duck, sheep, cow, rabbit, swan, dog, turtle, jelly fish, and even beaver....Our creativity is quite impressive, isn't it?

On Thursday, October the 16th, we read the story book, "Three Pigs, One Wolf, and Seven Magic Shapes." Besides learning the new animal vocabulary in Chinese, we were further inspired by the book and made more Qi-qiao-ban animals in the last 15 minutes of our class time.

The next Tuesday, we reviewed the Ha-ba-goy song, not only by singing, but also went through the lyrics line by line. It's actually fun to play this word game. Sometimes, we felt like we were reading the Chinese lyrics word-by-word already! We tried to finish our Qi-qiao-ban animal book. But then we had more creations and run out of time.

We are aiming to finish our Qi-qiao-ban Animal Book on Thursday, the 23rd, by adding covers to all our animal book pages. We'll go through the Ha-ba-Guo song word by word one more time. If things are going well, we may learn a new song. Of course, it will be related to animals again! Stay tuned. ; ) 

Link to the "一只哈巴狗 Yi-Zhi-Ha-Ba-Gou (a pug dog)" Song

We introduced the following song on 10/7, Tue. If you missed the class or wanted to review this song outside of our class meetings, please check it out at the link below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBbYODk-qmQ

Don't forget the body/hand movements to go with your singing. ;-)  Enjoy!

Lyrics for Sep Songs (with PinYin)

Hello Song 一

你好,你好(ni hao, ni hao)

你好吗？你好吗？(ni hao ma? ni hao ma?)

我很好,我很好(wo hen hao, wo hen hao)

谢谢你,谢谢你(xie xie ni, xie xie ni)

再见！再见！(zai jian! zai jian!)

******************************

Hello Song 二

你好、您好、你们好

(ni hao, nin hao, ni men hao)

同学好，老师好

(tong xue hao, lao shi hao)

早上好、下午好

(zao shang hao, xia wu hao)

你好、您好、你们好

(ni hao, nin hao, ni men hao)

******************************

声调歌／Four Tones

一声平平走

(yi sheng ping ping zou)

二声上山坡

(er sheng shang shan po)

三声下又上

(san sheng xia you shang)

四声滑下坡

(si sheng hua xia po)

******************************

拍手歌/ clapping hands

拍拍手、拍拍手、大家一起拍拍手

(pai pai shou, pai pai shou,dajia yiqi pai pai shou)

上拍拍、下拍拍

(shang pai pai, xia pai pai)

左拍拍、右拍拍

(zuo pai pai, you pai pai)

前拍拍、后拍拍

(qian pai pai, hou pai pai)

石头、剪子、布！

(shi tou, jian zi, bu!)

September Class Review

With only four students on board in Sep, we have lots of opportunities to practice our pronunciation, to seek for individual attention and help from the teacher.  So far, things we’ve learned, but not limited to, are the following:

*  how to greet and to respond to greetings in more sophisticated ways besides “Ni-hao.”  

* to count numbers 1 to 12 and read clocks, which allows us to playing the game “Old Wolf, Old Wolf, What Time Is It?” in Chinese.  

* to be aware of the different tones for one sound. One thing we have been aware is that in Mandarin Chinese, the tone of each character (equivalent to English word) is super important. Since many characters share the same sound but mean totally different things, four tones are used to differentiate them from each other; for example, mǎ (horse) is very different from mā (mother). 

* to recognize some Chinese characters and phrases, especially through playing the “Matching Cards” game. 

* to familiarized ourselves with Chinese classroom instructions. 

Belated Greeting

Chinese Club Students and Parents, da-jia-hao!

I've been thinking of putting up a blog for our club meetings lately. Sorry for taking so long for me to write up the very first entry, partly due to technic problems with my home Internet (I was out of Internet for almost the whole month of Sep).

Anyway, here you go: a new blog site! Hopefully, this blog will serve a place for us to communicate a little more, outside of our weekly meetings.

I will try my best to post things that we've been working on so far: Chinese phrases, characters, songs, rhymes, games, etc. It will be a resource site for all of us; a place where you can find materials for reviewing whenever needed.

Stay tuned!

Che Laoshi