The Northern California Chinese School Association held its third online teaching seminar on April 20th (last Sunday) with the theme “Comprehensive Chinese Teaching – Breaking Boundaries Without Limitations,” attracting over a hundred teachers from Taiwan, Argentina, Canada, and various parts of the United States. The seminar focused on Chinese character teaching, classroom design, and AI applications, bringing together a creative and innovative teaching event that spanned across different time zones.
President Li Naya expressed that the seminar had been planned for over two months and featured three standout speakers. Through this platform, they connected their expertise to provide global teachers with in-depth and practical teaching strategies. She particularly thanked the technical team behind the scenes and the colleagues of the association for their collaboration, ensuring the successful completion of the event and wished the participants a fruitful experience.
Yashu Zhuang, director of the South Bay Overseas Chinese Education Center, also delivered a speech online, commending the teachers for participating in further education during the holidays, which was touching. She lauded the association’s longstanding efforts in promoting Chinese education and emphasized that inviting three cross-regional speakers to the seminar provided innovative perspectives to enhance the quality of overseas Chinese teaching.
The seminar featured three experienced speakers as keynote speakers. Chen Yuming, a lecturer at the International Bachelor’s Program of National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and an adjunct lecturer at National Taichung University of Education, focused on graded Chinese character teaching. He shared how to design systematic learning content based on students’ proficiency levels, combining poetry, creativity, and interactive exercises to help students grasp Chinese characters from basic to advanced levels.
Teacher Yafei from the Washington DC Taiwan School specialized in creative teaching material design and shared teaching examples with the moon as the theme, including cut-and-paste exercises, interactive paper strips, sentence pattern exercises, and moon phase booklet crafting. She also designed moon idiom puzzles to make learning interactive and engaging for students. By using ChatGPT, she assisted in generating reading passages and comprehension questions, designed reusable felt teaching materials, emphasizing the combination of hands-on and fun in teaching materials.
Teacher Yunfen Fu from New York emphasized the core of sensory learning, combining visual, auditory, tactile, and physical activities to design interactive classrooms. She suggested that teachers use digital tools such as Padlet, Quizlet, Kahoot to create a gamified learning environment and introduced various activities like “One Minute Teacher,” “Ghost Card Draw,” and “Jenga Challenge” to enhance student engagement and memory retention.
Fu emphasized that while AI is advancing rapidly, it cannot replace sensory experiences and emotional connections. The value of Chinese teaching lies in the deep exchange of interpersonal interactions and cultural perceptions.
She also demonstrated teaching methods for classical poetry, guiding students in chanting and rhyming famous works like “Quiet Night Thoughts” and “The Seeker of the Quiet.” She encouraged students to create their own poems, have classmates translate them, and then post them in the classroom to foster an interactive learning community.
The course lasted from 10:30 AM to 5:00 PM on the day, with lunch breaks and raffle activities scheduled during the period. After the lunch break, the 2025 K Song Championship in the primary school category, Chen Pinxin, performed live, injecting a warm atmosphere into the course.