On Monday in kindergarten, we talked about clothes. I brought in some of my clothing to show them. We learned "coat" & "pants" & "shirt" & "shoes" & "slippers" & "scarf." They colored and some of them got to play dress up with my clothes. It was fun, they are always adorable!
We finished watching Groundhog Day in my A/V English class. Then we talked about the news. This week they will present 5-7 minute segments of the news. I think it will be really neat to see what they do. I assigned segments but they get to choose the topic. The focus has to be on the US. Otherwise, I told them to be creative. I'm excited to see how they turn out.
In Marketing we are working on branding. The class is 2 hours, so for the first hour I lecture on info from the book. I try and have something more fun and practical to do for the second hour of class. On Saturday last week (when we made up for National Day) we played brand bingo during the second half of class. They really enjoyed the game. This week we talked about the branding process. They came up with a brand and a logo. Some of the students were very creative and had great ideas. Others, the boys, were typical boys about it. But it was still entertaining. For the second hour, we talked about idioms. The idioms lesson was good, it should help them with sounding more fluent.
On Thursday I also had my writing classes. Last week we did descriptive writing. This week we worked on persuasive writing. In class we brainstormed on a topic that I had them write about for homework. The prompt was "Students in the USA should learn Chinese in elementary school." (In China they start learning English in 3rd grade.) I was surprised by the different reasons they came up with, both for and against learning Chinese. A lot of them thought that it was good so people can learn more about China's history and culture. Also, they said it would help for doing business internationally. The students that thought it was a bad idea said that either Chinese was too hard or that students wouldn't ever use Chinese in their real lives. I'm excited to read their papers and see what else they came up with.
My conversation class, Kouyu, focused on maps and directions this week. We watchedI showed them Google Earth which they really enjoyed. Then we talked about how maps are different in China vs. the US. One big difference is the way we say directions. In Chinese, you would say "east south" instead of "southeast." Also, we talked about how to give good directions using landmarks, time, distance, turns, etc. DK & I had bought maps a few weeks ago and we used those this week. We handed them out to the students and had them give us directions from one place to another. Then they did dialogues of helping a lost tourist. It went pretty well.
I was really pleased with my reading class this week. We are still working on Joyluck Club and it has been taking a while. We were finally able to have a discussion this week. Usually it takes most of class just summarizing what they have read. Our discussion was about fate and superstitions. It was a slow start, but I think this could be a good beginning. For the rest of class I had them work with their project groups. Their project for the book is to act out a scene from the book. They can either do it live as a skit for class or tape it. I also told them that they need to write a script. I'm excited to see what they come up with. I think it will be a good chance for them to be creative.
My adult class went well this weekend. They will all be taking a test later on their oral English. So we were preparing for possible questions. We talked about how to describe pictures, a frequent question on tests. I showed them pictures from my trips to London and Paris. Then I showed a picture of Grandpa Lyon and Margaret at a lake. They loved the picture! They said it was like a picture from Roman Holiday. After the pictures, we talked about idioms. I told them about English idioms and then had them tell me about some Chinese idioms. I love learning about their expressions and language!
After classes on Saturday, Danielle and I went out with some friends from our school. They are members of English Corner, the English club. We went to a pub near Nanjing University in Gulou. It was really fun, they are great people. Their English is phenomenal so it is easy to talk and have normal conversations with them.
Today has been really low key. We came back from downtown and have been working on class stuff for this week.
Hopefully I will update again soon, I will try not to wait so long between posts!
One of my students asked me to write a little article for the Foreign Language Newspaper at the school. She asked me to write about a place in China that was interesting for me. I wrote about Summer Palace in Beijing. I hope they like it. I'm not sure when the paper comes out, but I will be sure to get a copy!
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