Teacher Reflection

As I have previously mentioned in a past blog post I wrote I am doing my TE 401 placement at a Chinese Immersion school. I recently was given the opportunity to sit in a kindergarten Chinese classroom and observe the teacher and students. While I was observing in the classroom it was their portion of the class where they sit on the carpet and practice their chinese by singing songs, playing games, and other interactive activities. The student's enthusiasm for learning was incredible to see!

Kindergarten is the first year at Post Oak that the students begin to learn Chinese so the teacher was using a mixture of Chinese and English to instruct the students. For the most part anything she said in Chinese she would repeat again in English. The teacher used a lot of visuals and hand motions in order to assure that the students were all understanding what she was saying. They started off their carpet time by playing a game that they were very familiar with because they play it in their English class. They sat in circle with a bunch of a little saucers face down in the middle of the circle. One by one each student would flip over a saucer and say what number they flipped over. The objective of the game was to find the numbers in order starting with one. The game not only helped them to practice saying numbers in chinese but it also made them use their memory to the best of their ability. Next, they all stood up and sang a song along with doing hand motions to the words. Although I didn't know what they were singing I was able to get an idea of what they were singing about by watching their motions.

I really enjoyed being in the Chinese classroom to observe. I was able to compare a Chinese classroom here to a classroom actually located in China, which were very similar but did have some very apparent differences. The classrooms in China seemed to be a little more structured and disciplined. I like how in Chinese classrooms teachers tend to guide the students to answers and new information rather than simply lecturing students. I think teachers in American could really learn a lot from observing a Chinese classroom. I really hope to integrate ideas I have gotten from sitting in on different Chinese classrooms into my future classroom.