It begins!!

It has begun. Excitement, anxiety, disbelief, brief glorious moments of understanding, overwhelmed. They've felt it all these past two days as they try to figure out what exactly is going on in this Chinese classroom they now spend half the day in.

For the most part, all are handling it incredibly well, and soaking up and then using bits of Chinese at an inspiring rate. The main issues have been maintaining focus and listening while I teach them in this foreign tongue. If you can talk with your child about how to listen in class, reviewing what is and isn't appropriate even when they can't understand it all, it might help get us into good habits more quickly and then on to better chinese learning.

Today we focused on how to say "I love____" attached to various members of the family. They should know names of all family members. We've been reviewing things learned at Starcamp (numbers, colors etc) as well as explaining and practicing procedures (lining up quietly, how to sit at the rug).

We also did some simple math in Chinese, combining groups of objects and counting out the result.

You can ask your child to sing you a song, they should know 3 or 4 by now. They are also starting to become more familiar with simple phrases such as "Thank you" and "I'm sorry." form the book we're reading together.