This semester we had fun with learning about Chinese characters.  In Junior Primary we saw lots of pictures of the sun, moon, mountain and fire.  We wondered what the Chinese characters that symbolised these would look like.  In pairs, we tried to put the paper cuttings of the different strokes given to us, to form a character which we think represents the sun, moon, mountain and fire.  Then we drew a picture next to it to show how the character and picture relate.  Finally, the characters and their stroke order were revealed to us, and we practiced writing them.

In Primary we learnt the story behind 8 fundamental characters in Chinese that are also used as building blocks to form other Chinese characters or phrases.  We learnt the characters for fire,wood, sun, moon, person, mouth, door and mountain.  As you can see, the character for mouth looks like a mouth opening up wide.   

The character for person looks like a person walking.

The character for fire looks like a person calling out for help with waving arms.

A volcano is represented by the characters for fire and mountain together.

After learning the story behind each of these 8 characters, we learnt the how to write the strokes step by step.

In Years 5 and 6, we moved on from writing characters and we started to learn how to use our iPads to write Chinese characters, using the pinyin (spelling the sound of the Chinese characters) input method.  We created a short story on what our name is, which country we come from, and what our hobbies and interests are.

Emily Lo – Mandarin Teacher