Our sessions will always recycle what we have done in previous sessions, usually adding 1 or 2 new songs, or introducing a new story making connections to build on our foundation. So keep practicing the songs from week 1, but below are a few new things we will do this week!
We will add a new colour song to enjoy, just click on the link for video and lyrics, to help us memorise those colours!
Older kids will learn how Chinese people use hand gestures for numbers…the episode below of ‘Fun Fun Elmo’ has a segment to introduce us to these. We won’t be watching the whole Elmo episode…but it is a good series to watch at home, it is all in Mandarin but is VERY repetitive and great fun immersion for kids, both the young and older group! This particular episode has the hand gesture segment that we will watch in class. The whole series is free to watch on You Tube!
Younger kids will enjoy the Number Rap that we didn’t get a chance to include last week!
It is also the ‘Mid Autumn Festival’ this weekend, a really important Chinese celebration. We will watch this song/ video by Groovi Pauli, to springboard some curiosity about what this festival might be about!
Older kids (and parents of the younger kids) will be shown a tool that will help them if they want to find out more about Mandarin Syllable Pronunciation. This Mandarin Pinyin Chart by YoYo Chinese is a really good one, and also a really good course for parents to enrol in if they want to learn a little Mandarin too! There are lots of apps that have good pronunciation tables too that we can show at later sessions. Just having fun singing songs is the best way to wire the brain with the new sounds of Mandarin syllables, but some kids and parents do like a ‘chart’ to refer to as well!
Grammar note : we don’t really ‘do’ grammar in our lessons! But it is interesting to note the amazing grammar we do ‘practice’! Every time I ask the kids to put their hands on their knees, or we jump around to the exercise songs, or we do the Hokey Pokey…they are hearing the ‘把’ （bǎ）construction sentence. This is a really difficult grammatical concept to ‘get’ when kids and adults learn Chinese, there is no English equivalent and it makes the word order jumbled for English speakers…but when kids are exposed to this type of sentence over and over through song and classroom instruction, this grammatical construction will sound like second nature when studying more formal Chinese later down the track! There’s always a point to what we do in a Mandarin Motion Song and Story Time Session!
Looking forward to another fun session!