Specialist Mandarin Language Lessons

Today, we started our first of 6 specialist Mandarin language lessons with Miss Xie.  Miss Xie taught us Tai Chi last term and we are very excited to have her back in our classroom to teach us how to speak in Mandarin.

We first looked at why it is important to learn the language of Mandarin.  The children came up with some very good reasons including,

Then we looked at what we already know about the country of China.  The children had heard of lots of things about China - including the Great Wall of China, Chinese New Year, and that is it famous for it's beautiful traditional clothing.

We located China on the world map and noticed that it is in the Northern Hemisphere (NZL is in the Southern Hemisphere of course). China is a very large country, but it isn't the largest.  Russia is the largest, and the second largest is Canada.  China is the third largest country in the world.

The children found out that some of the countries that are near China are: India, Mongolia, Japan and Korea.  They really enjoyed looking at the World Map.

Then we looked at a map of China.  Miss Xie showed us how the map of China looks a little like a chicken.  They noticed a red star on the map that signified the capital city of Beijing (it is also the biggest city on China).  It is an old city with a history of over 500 years.  In comparison Shanghai has a history of 100 years.  Did you know that once the British owned Hong Kong?  China is 9.6 million square kilometres.

New Zealand' population is just over 4 million.  Did you know that China's population is in the billions?  1.3 billion people live in China!

Then we discussed the Great Wall of China.  It is over 2000 years old!  It took them 1000 years to build the entire wall. They built the wall to protect themselves and their country from their enemies. The children were intrigued to find out how the soldiers to communicate to the capital that the enemies were coming. The soldiers in the Watch Towers would burn something to create smoke. Each soldier would see smoke from the previous watch tower and start their own fire to send the message onto the next soldier in the Watch Tower.

This was an exciting lesson, filled with very interesting facts, and one which the children were very excited and engaged about their new learning.  We can't wait for our next session next Wednesday!