When I taught kindergarten, I realized there was a huge discrepancy between teaching and learning English and Chinese. I used reading workshop and guided reading to teach English and my students made huge gains. However, when I tried the same thing in Chinese, I found that the results were very dismal. My students didn’t learn as much Chinese as I had hoped.
I reflected on what happened and came to a simple conclusion. I didn’t have enough resources to teach Chinese. I only had five copies of each leveled reader to share with my students. The same was true with my English readers, but I had multiple books written at the same reading level. The same wasn’t true of my Chinese readers. Each reader built on the knowledge from the previous one. And the readers got difficult quickly. I couldn’t use the Chinese readers interchangeably. And most of the Chinese books were too difficult for my students anyway.
So I decided to write my own Chinese readers. I wanted an easy way for all my students to have access to the same reader at the same time. The best way was to make a reader that fits on one single sheet of paper. As a public school teacher, I don’t have much time or resources. I needed to save paper and copies. So I created little 8 page readers to help my students learn Chinese.
The little Chinese readers are easy to photocopy and simple to make. I only need to cut them in half, fold, and staple. The readers were the perfect size for little kindergarten hands.
Then I had to decide on the topic for my readers. Obviously they were going to review material I already taught in class. Most of my students are second language learners and some of them are recent immigrants. Sometimes their Chinese was better than their English.
By using topics I already covered in class, students could learn the material in English and Chinese. It could be a review for some, and a scaffold for my newcomers. By writing the readers myself, I could guarantee that the readers would have a simple pattern using kindergarten Chinese characters that they would be writing and learning in their Chinese character writing book.
I also drew all the pictures to make sure that they were clear and simple. I wanted students to be able to use picture clues to figure out the Chinese characters. Since my pictures are simple, there is no confusion as to what the Chinese character is referring to.
So, what were the topics I included? I included math topics about shapes and numbers. I included science topics about seeds, trees, weather, and animals. I included social studies topics about classroom rules, family, community, and maps. And as I teach, I will find other topics the students will need.
I have already added the Chinese phrasebook reader. It focuses on one Chinese character and introduces vocabulary with that character. I have also included readers about Chinese holidays and myths. I will continue to add more readers as I get more time to write. Stay tuned as more and more readers get added to the collection.
If you have any suggestions for other topics, please visit my teachers pay teachers store and leave comments or suggestions. You can visit my store, Working Wonders, at https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Working-Wonders.