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!