Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Hooray for technology

Today I met with the other 7 Chinese Utah teachers also doing the first year of this immersion program. It was agreed that one of the hardest things, no matter what school or how long the teacher had previously taught, is classroom management. It is just plain hard for first graders to focus. And to a completely foreign language even harder. Then ask them to learn correct behavior in this unfamiliar tongue, and, well, it's a challenge. This is where parent volunteers and parent discussions with your child help so much.  So thank you for all you're doing. As they start to get more and more vocabulary, while having correct behavior reinforced and undesired behavior have consequences, they will get it.

I am sure there are many questions on the homework sent home tonight. First: Don't worry if you can't understand it. The whole point is to give them practice writing characters.  Just have them look at the character on the left, then write that character out in each of the boxes in the line. We'll be going over it in class as well.

Today we talked about shapes again, shapes in the classroom and shapes in the environment. We're also still practicing small and big, moving into greater than and less than.

Great news!

I've been thinking and thinking about what to do to help you help your child at home with the Chinese. And then today I came across a really great website that lets me make  recordings of the words you can listen to and then record a response. I don't have a lot on there yet, but I'm really excited about it and will make assignments to help you and your student practice this hard-to-pronounce Chinese vocab. You can look at it by going to:

www.lingtlanguage.com/bchipman

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