1. Chinese Planning Journey Jess Curtis Year 7 Teacher Blockhouse Bay Intermediate School Jess Curtis BHBI 2015

2. Unit plan My colleague and I sat down to think how best to link the topics for year 7 so that they can follow on into year 8 Some questions that arose for us included: How do we cater for our Mandarin speakers? What do we do with students that already have primary experience? What order to we do the topics in? Jess Curtis BHBI 2015

3. What does it look like? Jess Curtis BHBI 2015

6. Example Jess Curtis BHBI 2015

7. Sharing Jess Curtis BHBI 2015

8. Occasional “task” Jess Curtis BHBI 2015

9. Order of topics (term 1) 1. Introducing yourself: name, how are you (so students can straight away use something) 2. Introduction to China: geography, general cultural points (for student interest and buy-in) 3. Where are you from: country names, nationality (students love mapping and enjoy sharing their own heritage and making cultural connections) 4. Numbers 1-10: with attention to tones and basic pinyin knowledge (students love the hand gestures and being able to count in another language) 5. Numbers 10-100: age, date (what day is it today, basic conversations, adding to basic introductions bank – working towards meeting another class for assessment) 6. Birthdays (making a class birthday chart – finishing basic introductions) Assessment: Meet with another class to meet, ask questions of others and complete basic introduction of themselves – students complete a task sheet for outcome – task will be authentic as most students do not know students in the other class so have a genuine gap, a lot of communicative practice will also be given. Jess Curtis BHBI 2015

10. How do we cater for our Mandarin speakers? We have used our Mandarin speakers as extra teachers or examples of pronunciation, very useful when you don’t want to have to revert to too much English Some of our Mandarin speakers don’t know how to write characters so I have encouraged my MLA to give them activities linked to this also. What do we do with students that already have primary experience? We have tried to think about just extending the topics further each time e.g. yes they will have covered Nǐ hǎo ma? But instead of just focusing on one or two replies extending these to include more sophisticated vocabulary: Wǒ ____hěn lèi/ bù hǎo/ bìng le/ háikěyi/ mǎmahūhu/ hěn máng/ chī le ma? SO FAR… Jess Curtis BHBI 2015

11. To date… This has worked for student engagement providing: -communicative formulaic phrases -balance of the cultural/ intercultural dimensions addressed alongside these Having weekly character focuses of either recognition or properly taught stroke order has engaged my year 7’s This will run into term 2 – as I’ve found so many interruptions have caused us to extend the programme It is also crucial that we ensure our students have fully grasped concepts before moving on Some areas students are really interested in and so you build on these Jess Curtis BHBI 2015