Week 9 (Session 1): Friday Craft Room Panda (Xiong Mao) Group

This session was full of interesting things. We first learnt ‘zao shang hao’ (good morning) in the beginning, and then celebrated the birthday for Ding Ding the panda. During this celebration, we learnt ‘sheng ri kuai le’ (Happy birthday), “sheng ri dan gao’ (birthday cake) and ‘li wu’ (presents). And during the snack time, we enhanced what we learnt before, such as ‘ping guo’ (apple / apples), ‘xiang jiao’ (banana / bananas), and ‘xi gua’(watermelon). The group activity time was wonderful. We first reviewed the three flashcards about birthday, and then played the toy birthday cakes. During the playing with birthday cakes, we enhanced the vocabulary including ‘sheng ri kuai le’ and ‘sheng ri dan gao’. After this, we made birthday card. All the kids in the Panda group including Nate, Shui Ling, Declan and Connor showed their talents in imitation in new vocabulary and in craft making!

See you next week!

Xie Xie!

Angel

Week 9 (Session 2): Friday Craft Room Panda (Xiong Mao) Group

The second session was wonderful. We had Ella, Madison, Evan, Nick, and Laura in the Panda group, which was a great team! During the group activity time, we first reviewed how to introduce ourselves – ‘wo jiao …’ (My name is … / I am …). Almost everyone did pretty well in this part. After the introduction, we enhanced the flashcards about birthday. Again, this part went quite well. Madison, Evan, and Laura almost followed each flashcards (never underestimate the attraction of the stickers!). Other children such as Ella, Nick and Ian also showed their great interest in the vocabulary. After this, we played with the toy birthday cakes to further enhance the vocabulary related to birthday, such as ‘sheng ri dan gao’ (birthday cake). We also made birthday cards! During the cards making, we learnt ‘sheng ri ka’ (birthday card / cards), and reviewed ‘sheng ri kuai le’ (happy birthday). Everyone did a great job and made progress during the group activity time!

See you next week!

Xie Xie!

Angel

It’s always so nice seeing every child in our play group on a pleasant Saturday morning – greeting them at the door and hearing them say ‘Ni hao’ to us with that cute smile on the little faces.

In the first session today we had Nikki, Georgie, Helena and our new member – Yuehun in our Monkey group. For Nikki, Georgie and Helena – I knew it wouldn’t be a problem for them to repeat each word after me, but they still did surprisingly well – even with the four-syllable words today, they managed to say them clearly in just one go. When we were reviewing the words on the flashcards, before I showed all the cards to the table, Helena said ‘I want the Mickey Mouse one, the pai dui (party) one’ – which showed that she could remember the word without looking at the card. There were quite a few candles on the card ‘la zhu’ (candles), so we counted them together in Mandarin – which all of them could do without my help. It was Yuehun’s first time at our playgroup, I would give him a high mark for settling into us so quickly and nicely. Yuehun could not only say each word we taught, but also say ‘xie xie’ (thanks) to me every time I handed him something. Overall all four children in our group performed very well today, good job!

We had Bella, Leah, Chloe, Harry, and Jade in our group in the second session today. All five of them did great jobs learning our new words and phrases on the topic ‘Birthday’. Jade and Leah really liked our birthday song and hummed  it during the activity, too. We played with toy cakes with candles and fruits on them, I pointed at the those and reinforced the Mandarin words ‘la zhu’ (candles), ‘ying tao’ (cherry), ‘ju zi’ (mandarin) and ‘nai you’ (cream) etc with the children. Chloe could copy each and every word I taught her to say, and Bella was very good at repeating the words as well. Ryan and Kiera joined us in the ‘dressing the bears’ activity (by the way, I was really sorry we didn’t have enough bears so each child could have one) and everybody dressed their bears with pretty outfits! Meanwhile, I told them to say words including ‘ku zi’ (pants), ‘da yi’ (coat), ‘xie zi’ (shoes) and ‘yanjing’ (glasses) etc. When we were packing up the toys, all of the children helped putting toys back in the box. Harry said ‘Bu yong xie’ (No worries) to me when I said ‘xie xie’ to him, how exciting!

Xie xie and see you all next week!

Monica