Homeschool Chinese: Good Morning, China

This past week, my kiddos have been working with a children's book by Hu Yong Yi titled, Good Morning, China. It is a delightful short story describing how China's people "celebrate" their mornings with activities in the park. As you turn each page, the author describes the variety of activities taking place on any given morning.

Some    一些 A Few    一些 Many   许多 Several    几个

He first read the story aloud and then discussed what the story was about. The kids were asked to summarize in their words what the story was about. Utilizing the pictures and context clues, they were able to translate characters or words that were unfamiliar to them.

Shawn provided them with a vocabulary sheet for these new words - using both pinyin and the simplified Chinese character. He also provided us with an audio recording he made. For homework, they were asked to utilize the tools provided to listen to the story and practice reading it themselves until they could read it fluently.

We really enjoyed the illustrations in this book. To our delight, the last page unfolds to reveal the whole picture.

Additionally, he asked both kids to write their own story following this same pattern. This is a great teaching strategy for foreign language learning.

They were encouraged to choose a location different than a park - though a location with which they were familiar - perhaps a beach, airport, or shopping mall. Utilizing the same vocabulary and sentence structure, they were both able to compose a similar story (90-120 characters in length).

They reviewed the story in class the following session. In the image below (an excerpt from my son's work), a few characters have been highlighted in red or blue to indicate an error. Below each error, he was asked to make a correction. With the corrected version of their story, they are now working to create a similar story of their own. With their completed story, they will read aloud their story utilizing illustrations or photographs to create a multimedia project they can share with others.

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