Today is Cross Cultures’ kick off lesson. Before the class started, I was nervous but excited about teaching these children Chinese. Considering the children we teach were relatively young, we decided to use activities and games to make the lecture more fun. There were a total of three activities: the candy game (each children can take up to five pieces, and the number of pieces equal the number of fun facts they will have to share), the storytelling game, and duck duck goose. As Miranda led the first game, we were very surprised that several students have already developed a decent experience and understanding with forming sentences, and could support their sentences with decent vocabularies. However, challenges appeared when Flora led the game of storytelling. Storytelling is not as simple as it seems, because it requires one’s ability to understand others and skill to complete an idea. Therefore, it’s expected that the children would struggle during this activity. However, we were very impressed that even though they could not continue with the previous sentence, they all showed much creativity by brainstorming their own ideas. At last, I led the game of duck duck goose (but in Chinese). From this game, the students learned how to say goose and duck in chinese, and seemed very eager to answer when Ms. Fernandez, their teacher and our local advisor for this project, asked what they have learned today.

Overall, today was a very exciting and fruitful day. We were able to see how the kids come up with such creative ideas and then express them in a different language. Also, we were able to determine the kids’ Chinese skill level and make adjustments to our lecture plans. We are all very delighted to be able to share our language to Non-Chinese speaker. Knowing the difficulty of this language, we will try our best to make the lessons as fun and entertaining as possible.

-- Jack W