Progress-3

Rap songs are a powerful teaching strategy. I create rap songs by myself based on the learning objects. One of the songs that I put in the video is the Hamburger song. In most foreign language classes, you just stay in your seat and sing a song. That’s it. Not in my Chinese class. For nearly all the songs we sing in my class, students dance and move to the music. I normally use a flamenco clapper to give the beat. In the video, Queen’s famous song, “We will rock you” is the background music we rap to. I have to say every time students hear this music, they want to dance, and they start to show interest. I will put part of the students’ performance in the final video.

Progress-2

Here is another comparison between sitting/quiet activities and movement activities. For the sitting activity, I have students make a mini-story book to express what they like to do after school. In the movement-based learning activity, I let them work in pairs or groups (they decide by themselves) to prepare a role play. In the sitting activity, one student complained to me that he could not draw. Some students did the mini-story book very quick and did not pay much attention to the task. Of course, a couple of students were doing excellent job.

For the second activity, students were so excited to hear that they would work in group to create a role play. I have to say that they were very creative and motivated. They came up with some crazy ideas which were fine with me as long as they were speaking in Chinese. They came to ask me a lot new vocabulary and sentences. I was so glad to see they were taking notes and practicing. They also incorporated Chinese culture, like dancing, into the show.

I guess in this round the “movement” activities won again.

Progress-1

The lesson was self introduction. I started the class by asking questions like:
“What’s your name?”; “How old are you?”; “What’s your nationality?”; “What do you like to do?”; “What do you like to eat?”; “How many people are in your family?”
I asked every student and checked on their understanding. When I asked one student a question, usually there were two other students talking to each other. One student was looking at the desk and seemed lost. One student was searching for the answers from her notebook. One student was drawing pictures in his notebook. Another student was at the white board with a confused look on her face.

After the review we played a game that I invented, which is a combination of baseball, tic-tac-toe, and reading a Chinese fortune cookie. I know it sounds weird, but students really love it. Here’s how the game is played: I write questions in Chinese on sheets of paper, and then wad them up into a paper balls. Students separate into two teams. Each team picks a ball and pitches it to their team member who tries to hit the paper ball with a little paddle which I made from card board. After a ball is hit, the rest of the team tries to catch the ball. When they catch the ball, they open they open it and read the Chinese question to a team member (open the paper ball to read a message in Chinese – like a fortune cookie!). If they can successfully read the questions (in Chinese) on the paper and answer it, the team can mark their sign (either X or O) on the tic-tac-toe on the white board. The tic-tac-toe game is basically the scoreboard.

All the students suddenly woke up and paid attention when I explained about playing this game. During the game, every student was smiling. Both teams were trying very hard to win the game. When someone read the question, the other students said “Pick me! I know the answer!” Every single student was engaged in the game and focused on the questions and answers in Chinese to win the game.

At the end of the class I asked each student to prepare an oral self-introduction - they all did it enthusiastically. After the class, I asked several students their opinion of that day’s teaching activities.
One boy said, “I loved the baseball game. I’m going to tell my mom that I can learn Chinese through playing baseball.”
Another student said, “I was surprised that I knew all the answers. That’s awesome. It was so fun. ”