July 4th weekend (but we didn't do anything thematic)

Five kids again this week. This week's playgroup was a bit heavy on character recognition and writing, so the other six-year-old lost interest. (She hasn't had any formal Chinese instruction yet.)

1. SONGS:
1a. 我的朋友在哪里 (Where is My Friend?)
Show/remind them the ASL gestures for 我的 (My), 朋友 (Friend), 在哪里 (Where) and 在这里 (Here).
1b. 小白兔，白又白 (Little white bunny)

2. INTRODUCTION:
Introduce themselves by their Chinese name. Explain the meaning. "我叫NAME. 国王的王. 生日的生." etc. I modeled the introduction by writing my name on the whiteboard and explaining the characters' meaning. Brooks introduced himself: ( Read more... )

3. READ-ALOUD:
3a. Read 先有蛋 (xiān yǒu dàn)/先有鸡 (xiān yǒu jī). First the Egg/First the Chicken by Laura Vaccaro Seeger.
3b. Read 红花红花几月开？(When Will The Red Flower Bloom?) from MyFirstChineseWords (#16)
3c. River asked me to also read 你在做什么? (What Are You Doing?) (#25) because he finds the deformed illustrations hilarious.

4. SHOW AND TELL:
"这是OBJECT."
One or two additional sentence about the object's color/size/physical characteristics.
Ask follow-up questions as appropriate.

River shared 这是我的耳机. 我的耳机是红色的. This is my headphones. My headphones are red. ( Read more... )

5. ACTIVITY #1:
Guess which character I'm writing.
One child write on the whiteboard one stroke at a time, pausing in between strokes to give the other kids chance to guess the character.

We cut the playgroup short at 30 minutes because the kids were vibrating more than usual this week.

6. REFRESHMENTS:
Bing & Rainier cherries 樱桃 Trad. 櫻桃 (yīng táo) etc.labeled with their Chinese names.
My mom made a plate of 饺子 Trad. 餃子 (jiǎo zi), which immediately disappeared.
There were also some sunflower seeds 葵花子 (kuí huā zǐ)

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There was another playgroup in-between at V's house, which for the purposes of this blog will be called #V1 and so on.

Plans for Playgroup #4: ( Plans for Playgroup #4 )

For playgroup #2's show-and-tell, Brooks shared "这是我的画儿。我画了一只小兔子。" (This is my drawing. I've drawn a little bunny.)

1. Start with the sentence "弟弟画了一只小兔子." ( Read more... )

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Circling Introspective:

- Circling is a hit when it's the two of them together. Before this session, I did 'circling' individually with them with the character 去, but the energy (and silliness) was not there.

- The more outlandish/non-sensical my questions are, the more eager River was to answer "是!" and "对!"

I asked: "弟弟吃了一只小羊吗？"
River: "是!"
Brooks: *pretends to eat his drawing of a sheep*

- When there are two sentences being circled, I need to start with a comprehension check on the first sentence.
I assumed they've acquired the "这是___" sentence structure from circling #1, so I skipped circling it. In actuality, they still need a lot more input of "这是___" sentences.


[ PDF file on how circling works ]

CIRCLING* -- DONE 6/8/19

Make a gray mouse out of play doh/clay Draw a mouse on the whiteboard. Have the (computing) mouse ready.

1. Start with the sentence "这是哥哥的鼠标 (shǔ biāo)." ( Read more... )

2. At random, ask these questions:
- YES question: "这是哥哥的鼠标吗?"

- NO question:
"这是哥哥的老鼠吗?"
"这是弟弟的鼠标吗?"

- OR question: "这是哥哥还是弟弟的鼠标?"

- 5Wh + H question:
"这是谁的鼠标?"
"这是什么?"

- etc. following their interest and attention span

I used these index cards at random to prompt myself: ( Read more... )

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Circling Introspective:

- They are (thankfully) easily amused. They would sometimes intentionally give the wrong answer, pick up my shoe and say, "这是妈妈的老鼠," etc.

- River said he did not hear every single thing that I said because he got distracted, but he did understand everything he did hear. And that's the main goal of circling/TPRS**: comprehensible input.

- When I asked Brooks, "英文怎么说," he answered "big brother's computer mouse" instead of "This is big brother's computer mouse." Either he hasn't acquired that "这是" = "This is," or he usually doesn't translate Mandarin into English in his head.

* Here's a pdf from Terry Waltz's website that tells you how circling works.

** TPRS = Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling