Chinese for Schools 1

Hello, welcome !

Welcome to LEVEL 1 of our PowerLanguage on-line Mandarin Chinese course. This programme has been created to support Primary teachers – specialist and non-specialist – with the teaching of Mandarin in their class.

 The course has 6 lessons which contain a mixture of videos from our Mandarin tutors, animations and PowerPoint documents, which all combine to help you enhance your Mandarin grammar, syntax, culture and pronunciation.

The teacher’s notes have been designed to give teachers additional information for some of the online resources. We’ve also suggested extra activities to be done to reinforce the learning in class or at home. Each lesson starts with its Key Language, the translation in English and soundfiles to support non specialist teachers.

In each lesson, you will be presented with the simplified Chinese characters and their romanized script (pinyin). At this stage, you are not expected to be able to read nor write Chinese characters. However, we encourage you to start familiarising yourself with the way they look, simply by observing them. You will note that some characters frequently appear throughout the lessons. Before you know it, you will be amazed you can recognise a number of them!

We have introduced cultural elements – one per lesson – through a series of little podcasts. There is a fun quiz attached to each podcast. Cultural aspects linked to China and the Chinese language are an essential part of this course.

 At the end of each lesson, we have a section called “Challenges”. This will help you and your class to apply your newly acquired knowledge. It will reinforce the learning and can work as an assessment for the lesson.

 We believe that teachers can send a strong message to their learners – exemplifying Lifelong Learning – by telling them that they will be learning along with their pupils.

Please pause the videos at regular intervals to practise a word or a sentence. You should try to say them out loud several times, don’t just say them in your head, the words have to come out!

We hope you enjoy your course.