Today I had a student teacher coming to see my class. It was scheduled to be a full minecraft session but I felt I wanted to show the student teacher something she should know because I am the only one trained with Chinese Language Teaching Pedagogy (at CTTC). I think CLIL is the most important one. So I asked my Y9 students to give me 5 minutes so I could demonstrate a learning task to the student teacher. As a Maths teacher, I know what they have learnt very well in Maths so I decided to showcase a 3 minute Maths in Chinese session.
I did have a few minutes before I started the session so I managed to think through what language I want to use:
长方形
正方形
长
宽
(number)
大小
乘以
是 / 这是 / 大小是 / 长是 / 宽是
I showed a rectangle and explained its length and width and its area (大小, not exactly, but sort of). Then I repeated a similar process to show a square. ALL in CHINESE.
Next, I drew another bigger rectangle, explaining its 长 and 宽. Then I asked students its 大小. Also a square and ask another question. ALL in CHINESE.
My students got my questions. It surprised my student teacher. Especially the answer 四百 (长是20、宽是20，大小是多少[with gestures]).
I forgot to video record this (I was going to). Otherwise, I will have hard evidence to show how easy it is to create a CLIL session).
What pleases me the most is not the right answers. It is how students said, ‘Oh… You can do Maths in Chinese’, etc. They were definitely intrigued and found some more use of Chinese.
If you are interested, there is an iPad based CLIL from CTTC:
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