Students' Background:
Students' Age: 7-9 years old.
Subject: Learning Chinese as a third language.
Level: Novice level (3rd-4th grades).
Class Length: 1 hour per class, twice a week.
At this young age, children may have difficulty concentrating for extended periods. To enhance engagement, I have incorporated various teaching techniques, including Total Physical Response (TPR) activities, and peer reviews into the class.
1. Body Number Gymnastics Activity (TPR):
Total Physical Response (TPR) benefits young children by promoting engagement, memory retention, active learning, and confidence, while reducing anxiety and offering immediate feedback.
After explicit teaching for practicing listening and speaking with numbers in a whole-class group, we transition to recognizing each character's shape. During this step, students collaboratively decide on suitable body actions to match each Chinese character, resulting in the creation of body number gymnastics.
2. Peer Review:
After the 'I do' phase, where I demonstrated the action and procedure, we proceeded to the 'we do' phase. During this phase, I observed and provided support as needed while all students presented the body number gymnastics. Subsequently, we moved on to the 'you do' phase, where each group took turns presenting the activity.
After a student completed their presentation, I invited their peers to raise a sign, indicating either 'Good job' or 'I have better ideas,' to express their opinions. This allowed for constructive feedback and encouraged discussion to develop higher-order thinking skills. As you can see from the video and photos, all of my students were engaged and concentrated, as each of them took turns being the teacher and performer. This means they evaluated others and were also evaluated by their peers at the same time.
This approach not only enables peer evaluation but also fosters critical thinking, self-awareness, and a collaborative learning environment. Students collaborate, make choices, provide feedback to one another, and take responsibility for their own learning.
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