How can we increase children’s interest in learning? In other words, how can primary 3 Chinese tuition start with my child’s interests? Immersion opens the door to Chinese learning.
An English teacher’s journey of letting her daughter learn Chinese.
In this four-part series, former New York professor and “ang moh pai” (Western education) English teacher Dr Yanyan Hu goes from tearing up Chinese textbooks to writing Chinese comics and a giant musical touring China 25 cities.
She shares her journey and how she enabled her American-born daughter with zero Chinese to thrive in a Taiwanese public school with all Chinese instruction.
This lecture series was produced for the Singapore Ministry of Education’s Mother Tongue Symposium 2020 and is supported by the Speak Mandarin Campaign.
How to stimulate children’s learning interest in primary 3 Chinese tuition?
Why is free time important for kids? When learning music or language, we often think that we have to start from the basics, step by step, and only move on to the next stage when we have mastered the basic level.
That’s why there are graded readers in classrooms, why we have grades and exams in music, and why kickboxing has different ribbons.
Have you also noticed that many children practice and learn to play the piano for years until 8th grade and then never play music again in their life? Have you ever noticed that many of us living in Singapore may have studied Chinese for many years but never read Chinese novels?
My speculation as to why this happened is that these learners never really felt ownership of the subject matter, and the process and lessons never really sparked their interest. It’s a “what my parents want me to do” or “I have to study to pass a test” kind of thing.
While we always assume we have to start with “the basics,” I think that focus is misplaced.
I think we have to start with “interest”, what is “interesting”!
It’s not that the foundation is not important, but that we must first engage in interest. This will take us further. Because studying is for living, not just for passing exams.
The father of progressive education, John Dewey, told us in Experience and Education (1938) that there must be experiential fireworks—those that arouse enough “curiosity,” strengthen “initiative,” and make learners “
It is enough that the experience of “desire and purpose” is aligned so that that spark can carry the learner through those difficult parts of learning when we have to work very, very hard to acquire new knowledge. This means effective learning starts with interest!
What does it mean to start with an interest?
Her curiosity and creativity will have to give way to mundane homework.
This is probably the most important point. What is the goal of learning anything – Chinese or any other subject?
Isn’t it about making our kids smart, creative, and innovative?
Especially when we know that in our current and future world, most jobs will be replaced by artificial intelligence, and the only thing that will allow our children to survive in the age of artificial intelligence is human intelligence, a major component of which must It’s creativity!
This means effective learning starts with interest!
What does it mean to start with an interest?
Curiosity and creativity will have to give way to mundane homework.
This is probably the most important point. What is the goal of learning anything – Chinese or any other subject?
Traditionally, the outside world’s impression of private schools is that there are many classes, many exams, and heavy schoolwork. This is indeed the case during the reporter’s on-site visits. But other than that, we also see some different changes in the current Weidao curriculum.
The day of my visit happened to be the regular class running time on Friday, and all the freshmen and sophomores in the school were busy taking “multiple elective courses”, walking faster than many public high schools.
During the interview, I observed a class called “Science for Playing Beauty”, which was co-taught by art, biology, physics, mathematics and other teachers, leading students to design websites and computer graphics.
Principle, draw many lively patterns and color them, and also design multi-color QR code, which is both beautiful and practical.
Every Saturday morning, students can also choose to deepen and broaden the “characteristic courses”.
Some courses focus on the analysis of previous exam questions and the strengthening of problem-solving skills, but there are also electives that are not related to exams, such as “AI programming” in the middle school The course has entered its fifth year.
The teacher who started the course, Cheng Weixiang, said that it can be combined with science exhibitions, and it is interesting, and is very popular among students. “I often think about what is the purpose of elite education?
It should be practiced and contribute to society.” Cheng Weixiang even combined with public services, leading students to exchange courses with Namasia Middle School in a remote village on weekends, encouraging those who take courses Junior high school students must learn mathematics and programming well before they can teach others.
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As for the more complicated characters, they are expressed in the form of building blocks. According to the shape and meaning of the characters, they are transformed into the most basic and simple elements.
Through the prompts, the images are formed in the brain, and the concept of the characters is established, and then the image text is read. To understand the meaning of words, deepen the understanding and impression of words.
Thomas pointed out that word forms and meanings are unique features of Chinese characters. When designing font-related pictures, they must be simple, easy to understand and easy to remember.
In addition, this learning method can also inspire creativity. Taking “birth” as an example, “the cow’s first birthday” was used as a prompt sentence. Later, a teacher proposed another interpretation method of “three-layer birthday cake”.
Thomas said: “The creative process allows learners to think carefully about the various elements of each character, and to experience the beauty of Chinese characters.”
Chinese learning needs to be done step by step, starting from learning single characters, and then combining single characters into words, using different character cards to form different characters or words, such as “日” and “月” become “明”, which can be associated with the sun and the moon are very bright the meaning of.
“Even nonsensical words, as long as they make sense, create associations, and understand them, that’s how Teochew comes from. Just like the compound word “Mingtian” I created, it means a luminous field.”
Summary:
We often hear “go with the child’s interests” but don’t know how to do it. I’ve demonstrated several methods:
“Symbiosis” with primary 3 Chinese tuition
Find ways to get our kids to contribute their knowledge
Most importantly, we need to protect and value free time because it is actually very productive time.