To continue last week’s good experience in using flash cards to teach Chinese words about some popular food and drink in both Chinese and American cultures, this week, I had children to learn more words about food in the categories of fruit, meat and vegetable with the help of visual tools like pictures and plastic food models. We made our fruit baskets and BBQ grill to celebrate this bi-week theme of food!

As I mentioned in the blog last week, children all did a good job in coloring some Chinese words of fruits with an appropriate color. To enforce the memory of those words, I found a picture of collection of fruits that covers those fruits we learned, and have children pick out the fruits they actually learned, cut them off from the collection, and glue each of them to the corresponding Chinese words. Children were enjoying creaking their own flash cards and collecting them in a “fruit basket”-a simple and handy one made of coffee filters. I like seeing them accomplishing things and taking “fruits” back home from my class. It was such a pleasure when one of the children told me he would like to keep it at home until his younger brother grow up and can also use his fruit basket to learn Mandarin! How sweet is that! ^_^

Learning Chinese words for meat and vegetable taker longer time and greater effort. Glad I was still able to find nice pictures of collection of meat and vegetable to assist children in learning those words as well as a checklist of those words with Pinyin. After practice reading those words, to make a collage of the words in a visual way, I had children pick out vegetable and meat they would like to grill in barbeque, cut them off the collection, and glue them onto a “griller” on the worksheet. Some students are very smart to also cut off the Chinese words with Pinyin on the checklist and glue them above the corresponding picture. This would for sure help them recall the Chinese words faster when they are “barbequing”. It inspired me as well~

We had two new students trying our Mandarin class the past Thursday. They had almost no prior knowledge of Mandarin. Though I was happy they found their place playing and learning in the class quickly. Those cute plastic fruits and vegetable models got them all excited and tried hard to recall words they learned. I even had two little teachers to help them do coloring of the fruits worksheet.

This is a second “fruitful”, “nutritious” and “delicious” week for our food lovers. I wish you all enjoy the spring break ahead of us and hopefully your children will pop out some Chinese words of food they are eating outside the class.

Keep an eye on our Flashcards online learning program. See you after the spring break!

Cheers!