June 27th marks the beginning of our first lesson. We begin with an icebreaker called “two truths and a lie” to learn a little more about our students. The students are very engaged in the game. We then move onto our first lesson. Because most of our students had not learned Chinese in the past, we did not ask them to self-learn the first lesson, but rather offer to learn together as a class. The first lesson is about “greetings,” and by the end of the class, all of our students are able to understand and say “hello (你好)” and “goodbye (再见).” Some students are able to learn “How are you? (你好吗？)” as well!

Closing up our second week together, we ended with a brief discussion on the Dragon Boat Festival in China, a traditional holiday celebrated two days ago on June 25th. The students learned with slideshows and videos put together by our volunteers. We also connected one of the activities during Dragon Boat Festival- dragon boat racing- with canoe racing on a similar Hawaiian holiday: Kuhio Day!