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On March 25, 2020, the Chinese School in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, will be in full swing for two months. Two months ago, I took over the Chinese course of the school, which is a low age zero basic mixed class. It is the most headache to make a curriculum plan for this class. Fortunately, my colleagues are very enthusiastic, and I have benefited a lot from their discussions; occasionally, local teachers participate in classroom learning and management when they listen to classes, which makes Chinese teaching gradually improve. Emmanuella stands out from the "many" students. We all call her Ella.
Ella (left) and her classmates
Children's homework
The most memorable thing is that I didn't emphasize how to spell Chinese Pinyin too much, and I didn't specially talk about tone. I only let them watch Pinyin imitate pronunciation in normal study. When we learned the topic "my body - hands" to play the game of "you play my guess", I took out the card of "Da" (D ǎ), and Ella immediately gave a clear and powerful voice of "Da" (D ǎ).
It is also gratifying that Ella has also shown amazing learning ability in learning Chinese characters of "great difficulty". The above picture is the content of the first week's course. I purposely didn't start from the teaching of strokes. I intended to test the children's perception of the complex Chinese character structure. But unexpectedly, she was not only able to write but also had a good grasp of the proportion when she just touched the Chinese character writing for less than a week. This encouraged me to attach great importance to the teaching of Chinese characters and strengthened my determination to strengthen the teaching of Chinese characters.
Ella's classroom exercises
The story above is an interlude after the Chinese class. There were many learning contents on that day, and it was difficult for the children. In order to let them actively participate in the classroom activities, I designed a classroom reward mechanism - the children who answered the questions correctly or participated in the classroom activities will get a panda shaped classroom currency; three or six panda currencies can be exchanged for different sweets. The intelligent Ella got the most panda money with her strength. When I was about to leave the classroom, Ella, Nelson and Joan blocked the door and asked me to give a candy to their second grade Emme teacher. I'm glad that they care about teachers. As a reward, they were also given one candy for each of them. The next day, teacher Emme showed me Ella's homework, and we all laughed. This is perhaps the most gratifying thing as a teacher!
Author brief introduction
Wang Qinghua, Chinese teacher volunteer, Confucius Institute, Lagos University, Nigeria.
Confucius Institute of Beijing University of Technology
Chinese teacher volunteer series
Weekly notes of volunteers in Confucius Institute of Lagos University