LOTE

LOTE 

Happy Year of the Tiger! Welcome to Term One! We trust you have enjoyed the break with your family and have had opportunities to build incredible memories together. This term, learners will engage in language acquisition associated with their Inquiry units of study, and the Chinese New Year celebration. Learners will also begin or further consolidate their language skills and begin a new Inquiry-based unit of learning. This year Li Laoshi will be taking Prep to Year 2 classes; Year 3 and Year 4 classes will be taken by Wang Laoshi; Guo Laoshi will lead Year 5 and Year 6 Mandarin learning.  ​

Prep

In this term, Preps will be introduced to some cultural background knowledge and greeting sentences in Chinese, including you, me, he/she/it, how are you, I'm fine, and the numbers zero to ten. Students will participate in a variety of classroom activities, such as Chinese character colouring, singing, dancing, and group games. Students will develop an interest in learning Mandarin and gain communication skills through classroom practice.

Year 1

In Term One, students continue to explore Mandarin topics such as courtesy language and the name of colours. We will use a certain amount of everyday language in a variety of classroom activities, such as thank you, you're welcome, sorry and never mind. Students will begin to use the language of colours in response to instructions in communication, such as picking out colours by recognizing Chinese characters and collecting objects based on the colours they hear.

Year 2

Year Two students will be focusing on the topics of daily greetings and meals. At different times throughout the day, students will greet each other in appropriate language and discuss their food, such as bread, milk, juice, noodles and rice. They will express their likes and dislikes about food by using the verbs eating and drinking. This will be brought together as they complete a visual representation to express their meals in a day.

Year 3

Students in Year Three will be learning to use language for introducing things that belong to us in the classroom at school. They will learn to identify the essential vocabulary for the target topic and develop metalanguage to talk about language structures. In addition, students will be practising the learned skills by interacting with others orally. Finally, to celebrate their learning, they will be creating a bilingual poster that provides them with the opportunity to recall learning from previous topics.

Year 4 

This term, students in Year Four will focus on describing the weather in Mandarin. They will be comparing and contrasting structural differences and similarities in sentences between Mandarin and English. Students will learn to orally tell seasons and create casual conversations about the weather using new vocabulary. By the end of the term, they will be given the opportunity to conduct a simulated world weather forecast with their peers.

Year 5 

Students in Year Five will develop the ability to use complex sentence structures in Chinese to introduce their daily outfit. To deepen their cultural knowledge and understanding, students will explore traditional Chinese costumes and national ethnic costumes along with information about history and culture. They will be given the opportunity to present their inquiry study in front of the whole class.

Year 6 

This term, the study will cover the vocabulary and sentences required for students to describe and give information about Chinese food, its history and culture. Students will be given a learning opportunity to inquire about the eight major cuisines in China and investigate which cuisines are popular in Australia and other countries and why. At the end of the term, they will create a virtual presentation to showcase their learning.