▲Mandarin Teacher Jou-Han Chen’s class activity II.
Two MOE-sponsored Mandarin teachers Jou-Han Chen and Yin-Jung Tao
started to teach at Kai Ming Head Start School in San Francisco as lead
teachers this semester. They expressed their deep impression with Kai
Ming’s hardworking and caring as a non-profit school for students from less
privileged families, as well as shared some stories from the class.
Tao’s students are from various backgrounds, reflecting the population
diversity of San Francisco. “Considering the children from multi lingual and
cultural backgrounds, I chose The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle to
start with. The story was very easy to understand, with repetitive sentences
and clear pictures, of course the kids were so into the story and always
shout out their favorites – ice cream, chocolate cake and lollipop. But what
impressed me the most was a girl who came to me the other day after the
story, carefully showing me two tiny white stones in her palms. ‘Teacher
Sherry, I found eggs! Now we have two baby caterpillars!’ She looked
satisfied, while I saw genuine imagination growing.” The diverse class also
sent Tao to a unique child. “The Hulk in my class loved to take off his top,
pop his eyes, and roar angrily. He also took any chances to color himself
green whenever the teachers happened to not keep an eye on him. To
convince him putting his shirt back, I painted some abs on a piece of green
paper and taped it on his shirt, proudly showed him and said, ‘Wow, how
cool this shirt is! I am going to put it on immediately!’ This successfully
made him beg me to put on the shirt for him so he could show off his abs to
all the teachers.” Tao stated, with a lot of smiles on her face. In her class,
immersion was a great way for both the students and the teacher to learn
from each other. “My classroom experience has also been a great
education for me as I learned many words in other languages, as well as
fascinating cultural customs, from my diverse children and their parents.”
Tao said.
“My students were Cantonese background. After one month of the new
school year, some of them naturally talked with me in Cantonese even
though they clearly knew that I had no idea about the language at all. The
reason they felt free to share everything directly in their home language
with me because I responded them in ‘active listening skill’, which was a
good way to build our relationship easily.” Chen stated. She showed her
smiling face, nodded all the time, bent down and looked at the children in
their eyes when they were talking, this helped reduce the language barrier
and let the children confident to express their ideas in various ways, while
“guiding me into their world. We read, painted, sang and played together,
we interacted like a family, shared our own characteristics, values and
cultures, merged all of them together, and then created our new world”.
Both Chen and Tao are going to teach at Kai Ming for the 2022 school year,
the first three weeks of their career showed a productive beginning, as well
as a positive relationship between the teachers and the students.
▲Mandarin Teacher Yin-Jung Tao’s class activity.
▲Mandarin Teacher Jou-Han Chen’s class activity I.
▲The “eggs” from Caterpillar.girl