父親節快樂，爸爸我愛你！fù qīn jiē kuài lè ，bà bà wǒ ài nǐ ！Happy father's day, I love you dad!

Say no more..... they love their dads of course but children enjoyed arts and crafts just as much.
I hope they will remember to give the cards to their dads on Sun.

We had a 粽子 zòngzi workshop to celebrate our 端午節 Duānwǔ Jié!

It's also called Dragon Boat Festival in Taiwan!
I won't bore you with the festival history as you can find them online here or just google it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duanwu_Festival

We introduced the festival with story and video. Some questions children had were hilarious!

The year of Rabbit - 2011 xīn nián kuài lè

Learning, learning, learning.....work time, work time, work time.

Children like to play and make things instead so I always plan something fun for the class so they don't realise that they are actually learning and working.

During the Chinese New Year, we have learnt the song Gong xi gong xi, we have made some Chinese arts & crafts, caligraphy and wrote our own spring couplets to decorate the house, we have watched some videos about the story of Nian monster, lantern festival & the tradition of Chinese New Year animated short films, we have learnt how to make Yuan xiao, we have tasted some homemade yuan xiao, dumplings & etc. and we had a CNY party!

Here're some crafts we made.

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog of Dublin School of Mandarin Chinese for Children

I have started teaching Mandarin Chinese to children from age 4 onwards in South Dublin / North Bray since Sept. 2009 and am still on a learning curve. Throught this blog, I hope not only to share my knowledge and experiences about teaching Mandarin Chinese to Children with others but also to communicate to the parents and pupils.

My aim is to encourage our next generation to have the interests in the Chinese culture and to have the ability to listen, to speak, to read, to type and to write in Mandarin Chinese. I personally think this language skill set will be my best present I could ever give to my own children (they are aged 4 and 6, both bilingual). Who knows, our children may even be able to get a great mark for the HSK, hanyu shuiping kaoshi (China) or TOP, test of proficiency-huayu (Taiwan).

My teaching methods are through play, singing, dancing, games and different activities to make learning Mandarin Chinese fun and easy for our children. I want to make it as much child/student centred as possible because each child is different and so is their learning styles.

I look forward to building up this blog and any suggestions and advice would be very much appreciated.