Hello! Mandarin SS 8 Parents ｜ CLIP 八年級 歷史-社會研究

米樂49

2020-21 CLIP G8 Mandarin Social Studies Back-to-School-Night Podcast

Thank you for taking the time to listen to this podcast. I am Ling-Ling Chern, a CLIP teacher. This year, like the past few years, I am teaching 8th-grade Chinese and Social Studies. I also have one period of 7th-grade Chinese class.

Teaching has been fun for me. I loved it when I first started a long time ago, and I still find inspiration and happiness as a teacher. I enjoy putting lessons together for students to learn both content and the Chinese language. I also enjoy getting to know individual students - their interests, talents, abilities, likes, and dislikes. Like all jobs, there are ups and downs, accomplishments and challenges. I have to admit that sometimes working with students can be overwhelming and cause me headaches. But, in the end, they always win me over with their spirit, creativity, energy, and smile.

I can continue sharing my thoughts about teaching and students. But, I had better switch to talking about curriculum. After all, your time is precious, and you care about what your students will be working on in CLIP classes this year.

I will start with History-Social Science or Mandarin Social Studies as it is listed on the Miller website. This year, the district adopted a new edition of the same textbook, "History Alive! The United States Through Industrialism", published by the Teacher Curriculum Institute (TCi). This curriculum company is based in Mountain View. We used the old edition for more than ten years without problems, but the text was older than the students, and the time is ripe for a change. After a year's piloting, History Alive was favored over other materials, and the best component of the new History Alive is its online materials, which include digital text, notebook, lesson games, vocabulary cards, assessments, and more.

We have a Chinese version of the textbook. This summer, all three middle school CLIP teachers worked on translating the TCi textbooks. Eight-grade translations can be found on one of my class websites. Each lesson comes in four different files

Traditional texts

Traditional texts with pinyin

Simplified texts

Simplified texts with pinyin

In addition to the English textbook, online access to TCi materials, and Chinese TCi readers, we also use articles on Newsela, a reading platform provided by the district, and iChineseReader, another online reading platform. As the name says, the reading materials are in Chinese. Occasionally, my history-related articles are published on this platform. So students will be reading my writing, in addition to textbook translations. On iChineseReader, students get to choose a story display in a simplified or traditional font, with or without pinyin. They can also choose to read or listen.

Please see my Back-to-School-Night slides for information on visiting online materials.

I try to keep in mind what history lessons are all about, and this is what I have come up with: we learn about what happened in the past, make connections to current events, and think about what historical events can impact in the future.