Getting ready for China

We have been busy shopping, cleaning and getting ready for our China trip.

Today, we watched "Kai-Lan's great trip to China" where she visits "gu nai-nai"(great aunt) and a baby panda in China. I know it's for little kids but it was good to give my kids few more vocabulary words like, "kai-xin = happy", "gen wo lai= follow me","hu tou xie= tiger shoe", etc. The show also emphasized "trying some new, because you might like it" which I know will be important for the kids when going to any new places, esp. a new country. So it was worth watching it for us.


We have also been looking at the tours we'll be taking for our China trip and learning the Chinese names as well as the English names and learning a little history about the various places we'll be visiting provided in the travel guide.

The children also love to play "shopping" in which they buy/sell stuff using "yuan" (Chinese currency) and practices bargaining in Chinese. A favorite phrase, "tai gui le!" (too expensive) :)

icon of China: Chairman Mao

I also did a key word "China" search in our library system for children's books (that's also how I found Kai-Lan) a while ago so they have been reading and listening to a lot of books to learn more about China culturally.

A few of the books we like that come to mind include,

1. The Long-haired girl by Doreen Rappaport
2. Liu and the Bird (A journey in Chinese calligraphy) by Catherine Louis
3. The Travel game by John Grandits (this is a book about a boy who plays imaginary "travel game" with his aunt and in the book, they travel to HongKong) W really wants to play the travel game; think that will have wait until we come back from China.

Miss J- Chinese language teacher

Today, J says she really likes learning Chinese. It came so out of the blue that I didn't totally understand what she meant. Then this afternoon, she was teaching Prime lessons from her old book and I suddenly understand what she meant this morning.

Now she knows if she knows something, she can teach it and that in itself is good gauge of her own level of mastery. She came over, super excited and tells me Prime knows his stuff. Then Prime demonstrate to me what he learned with J cheering him on the side happily. This also motivated her to keep on learning Chinese herself so she will always have something to be able to teach Prime.

We use both an immersion and a formal approach to learning Chinese. The immersion is for common every day conversation . The first goal is for the children to understand mandarin Chinese and then to being able to carry a simple conversation with other people who speak Chinese.

The formal (dialogue) approach targets on the reading, ping-ying (similar to phonics- tells you how to pronounce the Chinese character precisely), and recognition of the Chinese character simultaneously. This gives them the ability to be able learn Chinese by themselves like J currently is able to- to a certain degree. The dialogue in the text also gives me more ideas of what to work with them esp. certain sentence structures not common in my every day conversation with them. For now, we only work on this about 5-10 minutes every day.

We also allow them to watch Chinese TV whenever they want (limited to 1 episode per day) but they don't always choose that actually. Lately, they are more likely to chose watching Discovery channel. The goal of watching Chinese TV is so that they are familiar with how other people speak Chinese and not always just hearing mommy speak Chinese. This also give them some vocabulary that I don't use nor found in the textbooks.

Productive day

I have no pictures today and considering the kids didn't get up until 10am and Prime had few incidents of nosebleeds, we had a really productive day.

We did quite a bit of cleaning this morning. I rally the kids and we got it presentable together in a decent amount of time. I feel calm returning when the house is in order.

We also did our normal stuff: reading of bible stories and bible. J is making improvements on retelling the stories. Prime has been listening to fairy tales and has been enjoying them. The two favorite currently is Rumpelstitskin and Puss in the Boots. He always manage to find humor in the stories and giggles so much.

J practiced her math. But today I'm happy to say that she actually wanted to do it, again and again. The sand timer must plays a role as the motivating factor. We used double dominoes and she have to do subtraction and put the same answers in the same pile. Finally, she finished before the sand ran out. :)

For lunch, Prime learned to make scramble eggs as that is one his favorite dish.

In the afternoon, J surprised me today by doing a TON (approx: 1 hour) of dance all by herself. I borrowed a dance music CD from the library and she did free dance. She keep saying she was hot, hot but when the next song came on, she was up and dancing again. She uses some of the moves her teacher taught her but also put a lot of her own spin on to it. I felt she was really expressing herself through the music and interpreting what she felt the music was saying to her so it was very nice to see that.

We also tried a Chinese language course called "After School Chinese", borrowed from the library today. It works well for what I'm looking for. Right off the bat, the kids learned to introduce themselves in Chinese- what their names are, how old they are this year, and what they like to do. It has a very realistic clip of what actually happens in Chinese classroom, like when the teacher comes, students would be asked to stand up to greet the teacher and then sit down. only when the teacher gives permission. Also, the kids how to introduce others (like your mom to your classmates/friends and vice versa) when they are in a non-classroom setting. The kids liked it very much, esp Prime. I can see he really wanted to learn and absorb the info. It came as no surprise that J wanted to be the teacher and have Prime and I be the students. :)

Later, we even managed to make it to the splash park and the kids had fun there too.