After our evaluation/introduction lesson last week, we are finally ready to dive into the real learning!! Greeting is a necessary part of every language, so we decided to start off our lesson by teaching them the basic greetings in Chinese. After a brief demonstration, the students went around the classroom and introduced themselves to each other with “hi my name is ___, how are you?”, and respond to their classmates’ questions with “I’m very good, and you?”. To our surprise, one of our student taught her classmates how to say “thank you” at the end to make the sentence more formal and polite!

In order to show the students that emotions often weighs more in a language than the words of that language, I design a “challenge” for them at the end. In order to win the prize (candy), the student will have to say “hello, my name is ___” using the emotion that I told them, and the rest of the class will, in turn, have to guess the emotion. This activity exceeded our expectation, because all hands shot up the moment we asked for volunteers, and some even asked to help us come up with emotions for their classmates.

Today was definitely a success and I am very glad that both the teachers and the students enjoyed the hour we spent together. We definitely can’t wait to see them after thanksgiving break!

-- Miranda Z