A Field Trip Proposal - San Francisco 2015 Chinese New Year Parade

We had a great time today at our club meeting, singing the newly learned Chinese Zodiac Animal song, playing Bingo and Memory Matching games, and discussing some Chinese New Year celebration ideas! Our kids have shown great enthusiasm for the San Francisco Chinese New Year Parade that happens annually, and close enough to us for a possible one-day field trip. So I did some research and here's what I found:

http://www.sanfranciscochinatown.com/events/chinesenewyearparade.html

For this year, the parade will be happening on the March 7th, about two weeks after the Chinese New Year day (2/19) and perfectly scheduled on a Saturday evening. I think I can make it and it would be great if you can make it too (with families of course)! We may gather together right before the parade starts or as early as at lunch on that day and have some cultural exploration together in Chinatown. This is just my proposal. If it sounds an interesting/fun idea to you, please kindly drop me an email so we can plan it together. I wish we can make it!   

Jan Theme: Chinese Zodiac Animals

To celebrate the forthcoming Chinese New Year, I decided to introduce the Chinese Zodiac in our Jan meetings.  The Chinese Zodiac, known as 生肖 （sheng xiao），or 十二生肖（shi er sheng xiao) is based on a twelve year cycle, each year in that cycle related to an animal sign. These animal signs are the rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog and pig. It is calculated according to Chinese lunar calendar, which makes the Jan and Feb birthdays a little tricker to find out which animal that person "is."  For example, this year, babies born before or on Feb 18 (on the western calendar) would be little horses, instead of sheep (or goats），even though you may find the year of 2015 is the year of sheep (or goat 羊年）. 

Starting on this Tuesday, after reviewing the animals that we have already known, we identified the twelve zodiac animals and learned a song that contains all of them in the right order.

To find out which animal is our zodiac sign, each of us made a "Zodiac Wheel." By turning the "wheel window" to the year of your birthday, it shows the animal of that year! What a cool and fun craft.  

We made flash cards and played Bingo games, which all helped us memorize the new vocabulary. 

Few More Videos We Recorded Last December

I wish you had a great holiday season! Happy New Year, 新（xin）年（nian）快（kuai）乐（le）!

Today, I uploaded four more video clips that were recorded before the winter break. Good job, Alex and Isabella! Hope you all are having fun watching these and at the meantime reviewing what we've learned lately!

I'm looking forward to seeing you all next week! Welcome back to our Chinese Club! 

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.