Kate Howard
News Editor
On Mar. 28, the Chinese classes visited all three elementary schools to expose third graders to this ancient and increasingly important language at an early age through a 30-minute presentation. Participants created a storybook, which they read to their class in both Chinese and English, then followed the presentation up by engaging the children in story-related games about vocabulary and Chinese characters. The designed lessons included teaching animals, numbers, transportation and food in Chinese.
According to Chinese and Spanish teacher Linda Rosenthal, the trip was inspired by the Spanish levels IV and V annual field trip to Brookside Elementary School in Norwalk. “I teach Spanish level IV and they typically go to Brookside to reach out to the community,” she said. “And I thought after doing that, that we could expose [third graders]to the Chinese exotic language and culture.”
Although the field trip was set up similarly to the Brookside Elementary School field trip, instead of choosing a common children’s book, students were required to introduce 8-10 Chinese characters through their own handcrafted stories. “It is different in that the Chinese language students created books in Chinese and it involved more creativity and interaction to keep the students both focused and entertained,” Ms. Rosenthal said.
Instead of venturing to Saxe Middle School, Ms. Rosenthal said she decided to teach third graders because it corresponded to their curriculum. “It was an optimal time to go because it coincided with third graders learning about China,” she said.
Ms. Rosenthal said the trip encouraged students to be “teachers” for a day, as well as give back to the community in an educational way. “The high schoolers saw what teaching involved, and in this case it was to take a basic subject and plan, create and implement a basic lesson,” she said. “The project also involved a lot of collaboration. One student was responsible for reading the storybook in English, another one for reading it in Chinese, and another one for the artwork. It was a good experience and gave everybody a chance to keep everybody engaged and follow through with their lesson plans.”
Junior Kylie Lyman agreed and recognized the challenge of maintaining the attention of the young students. “It was a really great experience to watch all the third graders learn Chinese,” Kylie said. “They got so excited when they were able to recognize a character and they all loved when we gave them the opportunity to practice writing the characters. In my group our lesson tended to run short, so it was challenging for us to adjust the lesson and think on our feet of what activity we could do to keep the kids engaged.”
