Homeschool Chinese: What is Your Nationality
[caption id="attachment_1470" align="aligncenter" width="533"] I am from China / Wǒ láizì zhōngguó 我来自中国[/caption] In My First Chinese Reader, lesson number four is called What is Your Nationality? After introducing this lesson, Laoshi asked Jiejie to create a world map and to select eight countries to highlight by coloring them each a different color. He was then asked to create a speech bubble for each country (这是中国 / This is China). In the following weeks, they continued to work on developing the vocabulary associated with this lesson. Several other activities and projects were integrated into this lesson, including a street map with paper vehicles (I'll write a follow-up post about that activity soon). Another activity he did in class was to address an envelope to himself using Mandarin characters. This was a great activity for us because we write letters to friends and family weekly and it was fun to see how the address line corresponded to our house numbers and the zip code. Laoshi then mailed it to him with a surprise inside ... a postcard from China. For homework, Laoshi posted two files onto our Edmodo class, an audio file and a worksheet (shown above) which we printed out. Jiejie listened to the audio recording with the iPad and then completed the worksheet, matching each person with the correct street on which they live as stated in the audio. After the listening portion of the activity, he wrote the five sentences in Mandarin characters. [caption id="attachment_1758" align="aligncenter" width="300"] This is a screen shot of the homework assignment as posted in Edmodo.[/caption] Another homework activity required Jiejie to create 8 little people and not surprisingly, he opted to use his Lego mini-figs. He gave them each a name, some were Chinese (爸爸 / Baba / Father) while a few were American (Indiana Jones - can you guess his favorite movie?). He then created a 3 sentence dialogue for each mini-fig and wrote it down in Mandarin characters and practiced reciting the sentences orally. For example, " This is Norway. This is Indiana Jones. He lives in Norway. / 这是挪威。这是“夺宝奇兵”。他住在挪威。" [caption id="attachment_1756" align="aligncenter" width="533"] Jiejie practicing the dialogue at home[/caption] The culminating activity for this lesson brought everything together. Laoshi recorded him giving his presentation orally and titled it, Spacemen 杰杰. Enjoy!
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Your home school posts give me hope that I will be able to teach my two babies Chinese someday. Thank you for the blog!