Teaching a foreign language to young students who aren't yet fluent with their own language can pose a challenge. But the benefits of beginning language instruction at a young age outweigh the difficulties. Traditional teaching techniques, using oral and paper practice, are still effective, but combining familiar activities with new information really helps. The following activities, using children's games, allow students to review the basic number characters of the Chinese language and learn an advanced lesson about adjectives and descriptors.

Go Fish

Label thirty index cards with the numbers 1 through 10 written in Chinese characters. There will be three index cards for each number.

Mix the cards together, then pass out five cards to each student, placing the remaining cards in a pool in the middle.

Instruct the students to look at their cards and decide which cards they will try to collect.

Begin the round by having one student ask a student of their choice if they have any of a specific card. If the student does, he or she will give it to the student who asked. If he or she does not, the student who asked must "go fish," and draw a card from the pile in the middle.

Continue playing with one student asking at a time. When a student gets all three of a specific number, he or she has a "set" and can place them down. The first student to get rid of all of his or her cards is the winner.

Apples to Apples

Label 10 to 15 cards with a descriptive word in Chinese, such as tall, short, nice, funny, kind, impatient, etc, Instruct your students to write their names on five index cards. Mix up the descriptive words and give each student a set of all of the student names.

Instruct a student to pull out a descriptive word at random and place it in the middle of the group. Read aloud the Chinese pronunciation without giving the translation.

Have each student look at their sets of students names and select the person that is best described by the Chinese word. The student who drew the card will then decide which suggestion is best described by the word, thus ending the round. Whoever suggested the student keeps that description until the end of the game.

Continue to have each student draw a description and have the class submit a new card each time. The game is over when the cards run out, and the student with the most accepted suggestions wins.