Mandarin Language Learning at HIS: Part Two
Thank you to all the families who supported the Mandarin Curriculum event last Wednesday. Seeing so many people on our campus celebrating our Mandarin program was fantastic. The teachers and students worked hard to share their learning process with you to help you understand how we teach Mandarin at HIS.
We recognize that children do not learn a language in isolation, and the family is essential to helping our students to progress and feed confident understanding, responding to, speaking and writing Mandarin.
Here are some ways that you can support your child’s language development at home, no matter what stage of development your child is at:
· Set goals: Set goals together and how you can support your reach to reach them
· Get out: Take your child out to explore places in Hangzhou – the best way to learn and appreciate a language is to use it in context and for real purposes
· Use it: When out and about, encourage your child to use the language they are learning at school
· Notice: Highlight examples of language and language features in the world around you
· Explore: Visit museums and places that tell the story of Hangzhou and China’s history
· Get talking: Practice with native speakers as much as possible
· Be a role model: Learn a language yourself – and model the learning process
· Make mistakes: Be okay with mistakes! Learning a language is hard; encourage attempts to speak and try out new words and sentence structures
· Recast: If your child says something wrong, you can recast it by saying back what they said correctly without formally correcting them or telling them they’re wrong. For example, “Yes, we could go play at the swing this afternoon.”
· Read: Expose your child to a range of books and encourage reading and retelling the story
· Question: Ask your child a variety of questions about what they are reading
· Write: Encourage your child to write for a range of purposes – letters to friends, community leaders, stories, journals, shopping lists, etc. using the pinyin and characters they know and are learning
· Connect: Ask your child questions about what they are learning in class, what helps them to learn and how they can use their new knowledge
· Listen: Sing songs, watch TV shows, movies and plays in Mandarin
· Find out: Have a dictionary to help translate/find out unknown words
· Practice: Practice every day
· Have patience: Be patient – learning a language takes time, especially if you want to acquire academic language
· Have fun: Encourage creativity and play with the language. The more fun you can have with language, the better your child will learn and develop the skills they need to feel confident.
And, most importantly, make sure to share your language adventures with us.
快乐学习!
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