The Nine Suns

In 2^nd grade, the students mixed and matched a few words in a simple sentence. By 4^th grade, the 57 students were expressing fairly complicated ideas. At the beginning of class, the teacher asked if the students liked the sun and why. In fact, the teacher asked a lot of "why" questions throughout the class time. Also, the teacher did an effective job in disguising where the lesson was going. At first, it seemed a bit random. Fun and educational. But, random. She had nine Suns on the board. Volunteers came up and shot each Sun with a toy arrow. Behind each Sun but one was a vocabulary word. When the student shot a Sun, the teacher reviewed the word. I thought she picked words because the sound of the letter combinations differs in Chinese and English.

For example, "ai" in Chinese sounds "eye" in English. But, "ie" in the example above sounds like "eye". In Chinese, "ie" sounds like "ya" in English. Confused? The 4^th graders weren't. They also were not fooled by the main point of the lesson: to learn about the story "The Nine Suns". At this point, the teacher played a 2-minute recording of The Nine Suns. As the recording played, the students thought about six questions. The children have great listening and memory skills. I couldn't remember all of what was said in the recording. But, the children seemed to. Next the children played a brief reviewing game, similar to "Hot Potato", in which the student holding the toy when the music stopped had to answer a question.

My overall impressions for this class are the same as for the 2^nd grade class.

Two additional comments: The classroom was gigantic, about 25 meters X 10 meters. Each English class had more than 10 adults in the back observing. There were at least four people walking around taking pictures. But, the students did not seem distracted.