K-5 Mandarin News in January 2016 Happy New Year!

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN THE CLASSROOM:

Kindergarten:

During our daily routine activity, students continue to sing “The Months of the Year” Song. To reinforce the calendar activity students are doing in their homeroom classes, they also ask and answer the question “What month is it now?” in Mandarin. In addition to practicing routines related to calendars, this month, students finished the Family Member unit by showing their family photos to the class and introducing each family member in Mandarin. Kindergarteners also learned ten different colors and the “Color Song.” Ask your child to sing this song at home! During our color lessons, kindergarteners had fun looking for and identifying colorful objects in our classrooms. Students learned to ask and respond to questions in Mandarin like “What color do you like?” and “I like....” This month, students also read their third book of the year entitled “Balloons Fly in Mandarin!”

Kindergarten students are doing their family presentation.

Kindergarten students are finding objects with the color in the classroom.

1st Grade:

This month, our 1st grade students really enjoyed making their animal class book and recording their pages. After the animal unit, students began the “verb” unit and learned some action words and body parts. Students are learning songs to help them learn how to say different body parts in Mandarin. To aid them in their studies, students are creating “character art” in class. These are pieces of artwork that students create by using a Chinese character as the foundation for a picture that relates to the meaning of the character. Later on in this unit, all students will make a poster that showcases how “I use my (body parts) to (do something).” They will read their posters aloud to their classmates. First grade students are also reviewing the concept of place value in Mandarin and doing some single digit addition.

First Grade students are learning some verbs. They created character art according to the meaning of each character. For example, the 1st and 3rd characters’ meaning is flying while the second one means jumping.

2nd Grade:

After the Transportation unit, second graders began working on the Fruits unit where they reviewed and learned the names of fruit and closely examined the characters for fruits. They learned that many of the characters for fruit contain the “tree” and “grass” radicals, which are clues that students can use to deduce the meaning of unfamiliar Chinese characters. To support the Common Core Math Standards in Measurement and Data, students conducted a class survey on everyone’s favorite fruit. After collecting data and tallying the results, students represented the data on a bar graph, and then interpreted the graph by solving simple math problems.

2nd Grade students are doing their survey asking, “What is your favorite fruit?”

3rd Grade:

Third grade students continued with the Pet unit in which they reviewed the names of pets and learned to recognize animal characters. Besides physical attributes, students also named their imaginary pets in Mandarin, introduced their age and birthday, and indicated their favorite fruits. Students also practiced handwriting characters that they learned in the past to be prepared for their paragraph writing. To support the California Common Core State Standard in Number & Operations in Base Ten, students began working on big numbers thousand and ten thousand. Through games, they learned to recognize, read, and write numbers 1-10,000 with speed and automaticity in different contexts (e.g. word problems, skits, times tables).

3rd Grade students are working on saying big numbers like 47,779.

3rd grade students are practicing their “My Pet” presentation.

4th Grade:

In 4th grade Mandarin class, students continue to work on the Zoo Habitat unit. Students reviewed all the animals they have learned in the previous years and learned more animals through a variety of activities and games. In addition, student learned eleven habitats including wetland, cave, desert, forest, tundra, river, lake, grassland, city, sea, and mountain. This month, students also continued practicing pinyin, an important and ongoing process. In order to reinforce pinyin, students practiced using a variety of strategies including using mini-whiteboards to write down pinyin of the words that they heard from teachers. Students have shown a lot of improvement. As for character recognition, students had to use pinyin to type phrases and sentences on Google Docs and chose the correct characters from the dropdown menu. In order to meet students’ diverse needs, station activities were implemented in class. During the stations, students rotated to different learning centers where they focused on true/false questions, characters matching, and multiple-choice questions.

4th Grade students are rotating among different stations to do different activities, matching cards (characters, meanings and pinyin) and doing tests.

5th Grade:

5th Grade students are learning to talk about eating preferences in a Chinese restaurant. They are learning sentences like, “I don’t eat spicy food.” “May I have water with no ice?” “What specialties do you have?” and so on. They are also learning the measure words, which are included in such phrases as, “a plate of Hot and Spicy Tofu” and “Two bowls of rice” or “Three cups of tea.” This month, students role played ordering food in restaurants and created conversations themselves by typing on a Google Document. Students also learned to use chopsticks. We even had a competition in the class by timing each other on using chopsticks to pick up tiny fruit toys. It was such a fun experience! Following that, students also learned Chinese dining etiquette, including how to spin the Lazy Susan turntable, how to use communal utensils, and a very important rule: never stick chopsticks vertically into the rice. Next, students will learn the eight Chinese cuisines, each of their characteristics, and representative dishes. It is another thing they are looking forward to in addition to the one-week Chinese New Year Celebration Activities in February!

5th Grade students are learning how to use chopsticks and are having fun!

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