Dual Immersion Conference

I was not at school today, as I was attending the aforementioned conference. We received training and materials for teaching math in Chinese as well as heard from Dr. Myriam Mett of the National Foreign Language Center. 

We learned about Chinese curriculum coming form Susan Gong and her team at BYU that integrates the first grade core into a series of 35 books, giving the new language meaningful context and a presentable format. The books are currently being printed and will be in our classrooms sometime next week.

Everyone is still learning how to best teach in this immersion program, and it's exciting to be among the first in the nation to be doing so.  We're part of something quite revolutionary, something to which so many are committed to help make succeed. Thank you for your patience as we continue to learn and improve one day at time :)

I was just thinking today how incredible that the kids are already starting to produce language. The first stage in learning by immersion is the input stage. With Chinese being such a foreign sounding tongue, this input stage seems to be a bit longer before they connect meaning with the sound, store the sound and meaning together in their brain, and start to use it in applicable situations. 

But just yesterday I heard students telling each other to "lai" instead of saying it in English, telling each other dui bu qi and mei guan xi, and writing beautiful characters. It makes me get goosebumps almost to think of the opportunities I have been given and these kids will be given by being able to communicate, see, and understand the world in this beautiful language and culture. All efforts are worth it.

Many are still in mostly the input stage, so don't be alarmed if you don't hear them producing whole sentences or even some of the vocabulary. As we repeatedly use it in class and I give them more opportunities to hear it, associate it, and become comfortable with it, they will begin to speak.

At school today your child learned about traditions and legends associated with the Mid-Autumn or Moon Festival, and should have brought home a story they made about it as well as a puppet they can introduce themselves with . "Ni hao! Wo jiao_______"

What do you see?

We're about to start a book making project based off Eric Carle's Brown Bear Brown Bear. We read it today and practiced saying "What to do you see?" in Chinese.

 

Ni kan jian shenme? 

They already know "ni" (you) "kan" (see) and "shenme" (what). The extra "jian" is a way of emphasizing that you are both looking and seeing. Like saying that you are looking to the point of seeing.

In small groups we worked with shapes, recognizing characters, and how to write characters.

They should now be familiar with the following characters.

你 ni     好 hao        我 wo         是shi              月yue                   日ri         

you          good       me/I      am/to be     moon/month        day/sun       

 生sheng

birth/life

It might be helpful to print them out and make flash cards or hang them somewhere your child can see so they become familiar with the characters and associated sounds and meaning.

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

Mid Autumn Festival

The time is drawing near. Mid autumn festival, also known as the Moon festival, is one of the favorite holidays in China.

This year is falls on October 3rd. As with all Chinese holidays, there is a great story and many traditions to go with it. Here's one site about it:

http://www.chinahighlights.com/travelguide/festivals/mid-autumn-festival.htm

Today in class we focused on concepts of big and small, in preparation for learning about greater than and less than tomorrow.

大Da is the word for big, 小xiao the word for small.

They should recognize these two characters, and some can even write them quite well.

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 

This is....

Today's focus was on the phrase "This is a _____" and asking "What is this?"

In a previous post I explained how to say these in Chinese, but repetition's the key to language acquisition right? So it bears repeating.

zhe shi ____= this is____

zhe shi shenme?= what is this (literally: this is what?)

"zhe" is the "this" word, "shi" is the "is/to be/equals" word, and "shenme" is "what" and is always a question. It can also be used alone to just ask "What?"

We're working with addition and subtraction with numbers up to ten. All children should be able to count to ten in Chinese at this point. If you realize your child can't quite do this, let me know so I can give them a little extra help. Most should be able to count past ten, but we're still working on it.

Also, Mrs. Strasser and I are available tomorrow  for conferences from 4 until 7:15 on a first come first served basis. Because I can't speak English with the student there, the conference will have a first part where I meet with both of you and let your child show you some of the chinese they know, then have them step outside in the hall where there will be a little supervised activity for them to do while I speak with you.

One other heads up is we'll be having parent meetings for all Calvin Smith immersion parents with Mrs. Crawley throughout the year to get feedback on what's going well and what you'd like to see happen with the program. We'll send home notes and I'll post the dates on here when they happen.

Thanks so much for having great kids! 

xi huan!!!

I think we finally got it. I think every single child should now know xi huan and bu xi huan.

We spent a lot of time today saying and sorting what foods we did and didn't like. If you want to ask your child if they like something, just add the question word "ma" to the end of the expression. So you could say "Ni xi huan ma?" Ma turns any statement into a question.

We also took a math pre-test so I'll be more familiar with where we're starting from. Right off the weakest areas for everyone were money and time. Which is completely normal for first grade. We'll start working with those in our every day calendar, but feel free to start helping you child make sense of a clock or become familiar with coins.