Wednesday, March 18, 2020

Free Essays on ESOL Activities

SCHOOL-WIDE ACTIVITY: Latonya Baldwin In this activity, every class level will be responsible for selecting, researching and presenting a different country. In the research, they are to find out where the country is locate, what is, if any, the official language of that country, religion, type of educational system job market, types of food eaten there and if any holidays are celebrated there. This would be the perfect opportunity for older class levels children to teach and share information with the younger one’s as they work together in teams. Procedure: 1. In each classroom (grades 1-5) write the names of 7 different countries three times on a sheet of paper. Mix up the countries and have each student to draw a name from the hat. After everyone has received a country have them to group together according to the country that they pulled out of the hat. (same countries together) 2. Have everyone that have a country, meet in the cafeteria the next morning before classes (all grade levels) and group together according to their country. There should be at least 20 -25 students per country for grades 1-5 (depending on the number of students that each class has). 3. Have a mediator or group guide (teacher) meet with each group (country) and explain to them that are to collect information regarding that country. Break down the groups into sections: internet information group, drawing and coloring of flag and map of country, food selection, etc. 4. Allow the children to meet both during class time and before or after school to gather, put together and study their information that they collect. 5. During the week of Christmas break, which is the largest celebrated holiday in America, have the children to put on a school-wide presentation of their countries. Each group should put together a presentation of their country through music, song, dance, poetry, puppetry, or any other way they choose to present their ... Free Essays on ESOL Activities Free Essays on ESOL Activities SCHOOL-WIDE ACTIVITY: Latonya Baldwin In this activity, every class level will be responsible for selecting, researching and presenting a different country. In the research, they are to find out where the country is locate, what is, if any, the official language of that country, religion, type of educational system job market, types of food eaten there and if any holidays are celebrated there. This would be the perfect opportunity for older class levels children to teach and share information with the younger one’s as they work together in teams. Procedure: 1. In each classroom (grades 1-5) write the names of 7 different countries three times on a sheet of paper. Mix up the countries and have each student to draw a name from the hat. After everyone has received a country have them to group together according to the country that they pulled out of the hat. (same countries together) 2. Have everyone that have a country, meet in the cafeteria the next morning before classes (all grade levels) and group together according to their country. There should be at least 20 -25 students per country for grades 1-5 (depending on the number of students that each class has). 3. Have a mediator or group guide (teacher) meet with each group (country) and explain to them that are to collect information regarding that country. Break down the groups into sections: internet information group, drawing and coloring of flag and map of country, food selection, etc. 4. Allow the children to meet both during class time and before or after school to gather, put together and study their information that they collect. 5. During the week of Christmas break, which is the largest celebrated holiday in America, have the children to put on a school-wide presentation of their countries. Each group should put together a presentation of their country through music, song, dance, poetry, puppetry, or any other way they choose to present their ...

Monday, March 2, 2020

Learning About Chinese Characters

Learning About Chinese Characters There are more than 80,000 Chinese characters, but most of them are seldom used today. So how many Chinese characters do you need to know? For basic reading and writing of modern Chinese, you only need a few thousand. Here are the coverage rates of the most frequently used Chinese characters: Most frequently used  1,000  characters:  ~90%  coverage rateMost frequently used  2,500  characters:  98.0%  coverage rateMost frequently used  3,500  characters:  99.5%  coverage rate Two or More Chinese Characters per English Word For an English word, the Chinese translation (or the Chinese word) often consists of two or more  Chinese characters. You should use them together and read them from left to right. If you want to arrange them vertically, the one on the leftmost should go to the top. See an example for the word English below: As you can see, there are two Chinese characters for English (the language), which are ying1 yu3 in Pinyin.  Pinyin  is the international standard romanization scheme for Chinese characters, which is useful for learning the phonetics of Mandarin. There are four tones in Pinyin and we use the numbers here, i.e., 1, 2, 3, and 4, to depict the four tones. If you want to learn Mandarin (or Pu3 Tong1 Hua4), you have to master the four tones of the language. However, one pinyin usually represents many Chinese characters. For example, han4 can depict the Chinese characters for sweet, drought, brave, Chinese, etc. Thus you have to learn the Chinese characters to master the language. Chinese  is not alphabetic, so the writing is not related to its phonetics. In Chinese, We dont translate the Western alphabet since the letters have no meaning, though we do use the letters in writings, especially in scientific writings. Styles of Chinese Writing There are many styles of Chinese writing. Some of the styles are more ancient than others. In general, there are large differences among the styles, even though some of the styles are quite close. Different styles of Chinese characters are naturally used according to the purposes of the writing, such as Xiaozhuan mainly used for seal carving now. Besides the different styles, there are also two forms of Chinese characters, the simplified and the traditional. The simplified is the standard writing form employed in the mainland of China and the traditional form is mainly used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. There are total 2,235 simplified characters contained in the Simplified Character Table published in 1964 by the Chinese government, so the majority of the Chinese characters are the same in the two forms, though the count of commonly-used Chinese characters is only about 3,500. All the Chinese characters on our site are Kaiti (the standard style) in the simplified form. Japanese Kanji are originally from China, so most of them are the same as their corresponding Chinese characters, but Japanese kanji only contains a small collection of Chinese characters. There are a lot more Chinese characters not included in Japanese Kanji. Kanji are used less and less now in Japan. You dont see a lot of Kanji in a modern Japanese book anymore.