Time: 3:15 PM to 4:15 PM
Dates: Wednesdays, April 30th to June 4th
Location: The Joseph Sears School
Fun with Chinese Language
Program Description:
Haihong Shi is a certified Chinese teacher for K-12 with more than 25 years of teaching experience. In the Spring session, she will teach students the basic Chinese language writing system, the numbers 1 to 100, and pronunciation, via hands-on activities and collaboration. By the end of the six classes, students will be able to greet in Mandarin Chinese, write and say Chinese basic characters and numbers and the combinations of some complex characters, and know the meaning of what they learned.
You may wonder, “Why should my children learn Chinese?” Frank Tang’s Brain-Based Research and Second/Foreign Language Learning, NYU (New York University), showed that the brain is just like a muscle: either you use it or you lose it! Studying Chinese stimulates different parts of the brain, because Chinese is very different from English in sound, tone, and script.
“Chinese ‘Takes More Brain Power,’” conducted by researchers from the Wellcome Trust in the UK, found that “people who speak Mandarin Chinese use both temporal lobes of their brains to understand the language.” This is very different from English-language speakers, who use only the left temporal lobe (June, 2003).
The academic and cognitive benefits of learning Chinese characters are good reasons why learning Chinese can be a valuable experience for students at a young age.
