Teaching in China: lesson plans

July 27, 2006 by dave | 0 comments

Instant Lesson Plans

I often can’t think of enough content for my lessons, so here are some of my fallback plans.

Photo game: I printed up 30-40 photos from my collection, mostly boring things like two people having dinner, or me juggling oranges or the front of my parents’ boring suburban house. I split the kids up, one kid gets a picture and has to describe it to the other who draws it. They love trying to figure out what’s what. The point of the game is to use words that they know but never practice.

Tell us about:
- Anything that involves each person talking takes forever. It’s sometimes hard to think of something that everyone finds mildly interesting and can talk about.
- Their hometown. Usuually I draw a map of China on the board and have them locate and label their hometowns and 7 provinces on it.
- They love to talk about their cellphones, and there’s a lot you can say. Usually I frame it as they are trying to sell their phones.
- Another country, careful or they’ll all do the same 3.
- Choose a famous business (with an English name) and describe it, the class has to guess it. This also works sometimes with a person, but 90% of them seem to choose a Chinese pop star I’ve never heard of.

Flash cards: Especially with beginner classes, I like to use flash cards. There are 10 RMB sets of 100 characters which sort of have translations (95% accurate). There’re also my Chinese language cards, but they aren’t great. I also have a set of flags of countries for them to identify.

Music Videos & Advertisements: I downloaded a collection of famous music videos, they seemed to like that, but that requires a projector. Advertisements worked much better, try to find a collection on isohunt or somewhere

Here are some worksheets Stacey put together for her students, feel free to use them.

Eurica!

numbers for the people.

Teaching in China: lesson plans