In Miss Sun’s Year 8 Mandarin beginner class, students learned a complex sentence structure which is “somebody goes to a place by a certain transportation at a particular time”. In the first lesson, the students learned eight kinds of transportations and practiced how to pronounce them properly. In the second lesson, after reviewing the phrases of time and learning how to say “going somewhere” in Mandarin, the students got five sentences that each had parts with different colours. They discussed with their group members and summarised the sentence pattern by themselves.
After getting the correct sentence pattern, students wrote sentences as a group. Each member had their own job. One was in charge of writing subjects, one is in charge of writing time phrases, one in charge of writing transportations and places to go. Then they put each part on the table in the correct order to make sure the meaning was clear. Each group had a leader to help to solve problems.
Finally, each student made their own sentences in Mandarin which is related to their own experiences and there were many interesting sentences.
Miss Eve Sun