Week 10: Friday/ Saturday Craft Room General Overview

it’s our lovely Ling Ling’s birthday this week! We all put on our hats and had a huge birthday pai du (party) for Ling Ling. Everybody shared the birthday cake and we also gave presents to Ling Ling.

It was also Helena’s 4th birthday this week. Thank you Helena for bringing a cake and sharing it with us. Aidan’s and Nikki’s mums also brought cakes to the class for all the children to share. We would like to thank all of you dearly.

We made cupcakes for craft this week. All the children showed their great passion and creativity by picking the colours and decorations to put on the plate. Lovely!

Xie xie and hope to see you all next term!

Colleen

Katie, Jade and Adrian were in our Monkey group today. This was the second week learning about ‘Happy birthday’, and I could feel that all children were obviously more confident in saying the words on the flash cards. Jade was so motivated today and said each and every word I taught her. Good girl! Katie did super well, too. She looked in my eyes and repeated the words after me really clearly, e.g. ’sheng ri dan gao’ (birthday cake), ‘la zhu’ (candle/s) and ‘li wu’ (present/s). Connor and Declan joined us for our doll house actvity, which everyody seemed to enjoy. Katie put two of the dolls to bed and said ‘They’re sleeping’. I then pointed at the dolls, closed my eyes and said ’shui jiao’ (sleep/sleeping) a few times. Katie got what I meant at once and repeated after me ’shui jiao, shui jiao’. And Adrian, when I taught him the word ‘chu zi’ (cupboard) during activitiy time, he pickup up another toy cupoard and said to me ‘chu zi’, which showed that he totally understood what I meant. Awesome, Adrian! By the way, xie xie Katie for bringing the photos again! That was great for our group to share your pleasant experience while learning some new words in Mandarin!

In the second session we had Holly, Cai, Kate, Cassy and our new friend – Darcy in our group. We had an excellent start by self-introduction: Holly was the first one to say ‘wo jiao Holly’ perfectly clearly, and then all the othr girls just couldnt wait to say their names to the group. It was Darcy’s first time at Mandarin Stars, but he seemed to be truly inspired by the other children in our group and said quite a lot of words as well. I sat beside him at the beginning of the class, and I could hear him following us to say words like ‘dan gao’ (cake) and ‘la zhu’ (candle/s) with confidence. The group overall did extremly well in the flashcards revision – all five of them. We then played with the doll house, which was a great chance for the children to learn words like ‘zhuo zi’ (desk/table), ‘wu ding’ (roof), ‘yi  zi’ (chair) and ’sha fa’ (sofa) etc. Kate said every word I told her to say, and she hugged her brother Henry and said some of the words to him. How lovely is that! For craft we did ‘cup cakes’, and I realised in this part that most children in our group are now pretty familiar with the names of the colours now – when I was handing out the stars, I said to Cai and Cassy: ‘Hong se (red)? Lan se (blue)’, Cai immediately replied ‘hong se’ and Cassy said ‘lan se’. Excellent!

Have a wonderful holiday and looking forward to seeing you all next term!

Xie xie!

Monica