SPIRAL’s senior students at East Lyme High School decided to create and run a workshop on China for the 6th graders at East Lyme Middle School who are learning about China in their history class this year.
Session one started with a review of “what do you know about China” (size, population, dialects, basic history). In session two, the American students learned about Chinese names and how the Chinese students had chosen their English names. They talked about the Chinese New Year celebration and figured out what animal everyone was. During session three, the seniors explained the importance of tones in the Chinese language (how the same word with a different tone can mean something completely different), and taught the group some greetings and basic expressions, as well as counting 1-10. Finally, in session four, the students reviewed the words and expressions from session three. Each American student picked a Chinese name and worked on learning how to write it in Chinese characters. The finale was learning how to eat with chopsticks, finishing up with a chopstick contest to see who could pick up the smallest piece of food!
All the sessions were designed and facilitated entirely by the SPIRAL students, who are hoping to do a similar workshop for the local elementary school.
