Shapes

Sorry there was no post yesterday.... but it was great to see and talk to some of you at conferences. It helps me so much to hear your feedback and see your goals and hopes for your child. Thank you for your patience with me as I try to figure out how to best teach, run and manage a classroom of six year olds who can't understand a word I'm saying.

I really do appreciate feedback. So if you have anything you'd like to see implemented, tell me. I'm going to be a bit more strict as far as keeping of classroom rules, so if your child comes home and says I'm mean.... that may be why :)

Yesterday we worked with shapes. I quickly found out that the names of these shapes are very hard for the kids to memorize and keep separate, as they are a little long and sound very similar.

The names of the shapes are as follows:

Circle: yuan xing (*but you can also say quan quan, which all of them have now picked up because that's what I tell them when we need to sit in a circle on the floor. Yuan xing is a more appropriate geometric label, so they need to learn it)

Square: zheng fang xing (remember zh is said like a j)

Rectangle: chang fang xing

Triangle: san jiao xing 

"xing" means basically "shape" and the character before the "xing" is just describing what kind of shape.

Example yuan xing, circle, means literally "round shape" and san jiao xing, traingle, means "three angle shape"

We're going to work on getting one down a day next week.

I've also had some ask about counting above ten in chinese. Being the very logical language it is, to go above ten, you just have just say "ten" and then whatever number is in the one's place.

Example eleven is shi yi (ten one) 十一

twelve is shi er (ten two)十二 

thirteen shi san (ten three)十三

fourteen十四，fifteen十五etc.

To say/write twenty, thirty and so on, you just say how many tens. Example twenty is er shi (two tens) 二十

twenty one is er shi yi (two tens one)二十一

二十三， 二十四， 二十五 and so on.

This way of labeling numbers really helps with understanding how our number system works. Right away they see that we count in groups of tens and have to think about place values without even realizing it.

But when you do written  math in Chinese, we just use the numerals they are you are already familiar with. Isn't that great?

p.s. We're running low on snacks, so if you want to send a little snack with your child (enough for 25 kids) they would all love you