This is one of the things that I did in Mandarin class to celebrate the Chinese new year. It was on the bulletin board in the lobby for a short period of time. I worked on it with Elijah. The fish and the Chinese phrase is a pun. It is saying along the lines of: there will be plentiful of good luck in the new year, but instead of using the right character for the sentence, the sentence uses a homophone of sorts, which is pronounced the same and means fish. So it kind of means bring a lot of good luck and fish in the new year. The color of the paper and fish is red because red is the color of luck and warding away evil in the Chinese culture.

This is another one of the things that I did in Mandarin class to celebrate the Chinese new year. It is personal for me.

character means good fortune

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_xha4fiui3xUmJRVHhZLVB2XzQ

This is a mandarin assignment that I finished recently. It is a video telling the story of the Chinese dragon boat festival. I play the water dragon in the movie. In a few weeks I will be verbally assessed on my lines. I learned a lot of new vocabulary from this project because of how detailed our lines are. I also learned about the story of the festival itself. The movie itself is very humorous while still retaining it’s educational purposes. Enjoy.

This is my quizlet set. You have probably seen this in previous Mandarin posts, but it has  changed a lot since last time. It contains sentences and phrases from units that we have been studying such as, colors, sports, body parts, and fruits and vegetables. I have learned a lot about sentence structure, too. Which will be good for 7th grade because in 7th grade you write huge paragraphs and you learn all about sentence structure. I feel like this quarter has been my most productive Mandarin quarter yet. So take a look.

In this photo we are performing tai chi at the PAC. We worked very hard on it. We have been learning the Yang Basic 8 Step. Xin also put some groovy music in the background for dramatic effect. It was really hard to get the timing right in our practices. In the actual performance we sped up a lot but then we made up for it by going super slow in the end, since we want it to be in sync with the music.

We did another project where everyone in the class wrote descriptions of a random alien and then drew it. Then one by one, people would come up to front of the classroom and read the descriptions of their alien. Everybody else would draw what they heard without the aid of the person’s alien on a post-it. In the end when everyone has gone we put the post-its to their respective alien drawing. Then the person took their own drawing and chose a winner of who got closest to the original drawing.

That is what we have been doing in the 3rd quarter.

My pictographic character is called lâo. It means the word old. It depicts an old man on a walking stick. I chose this character because I think we should respect our elders and their many many, many years of wisdom.