* 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.
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!
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.
  |
