Page 4 - sample pack

The Primary Mandarin Online Classroom is our electronic product and website. The website contains information on all of our products, and also has a student and teacher inter face. Students receive a username and password and can access the site via the Internet, either at home or at school, to consolidate the vocabulary they have learnt in the classroom. The student inter face offers students the oppor tunity to listen to audio, scroll page by page through the Readers as eBooks, and complete multiple choice comprehension questions that are automatically marked. The teacher inter face allows you to log in to monitor the children’s progress, either by viewing each child’s progress separately, or looking at class statistics.

The main aim of the Primary Mandarin suite is to impar t knowledge of the Chinese language. However, the products also help learners make a connection between the language they are learning and the world they live in. The Chinese Cultural Pack contains information about China’s most impor tant festivals, mythological and historical stories and landmarks, in order to help children understand more about cross-cultural relationships and the world around them. Various subject areas are linked with Mandarin through the Cultural Pack, such as ar ts and crafts and cookery.

The Primary Mandarin Games Pack contains 50 games designed to reinforce classroom and home learning through playful interaction between peers. The games are designed to cover all aspects of the learning process; reading, writing, listening and speaking, and are divided up into these sections to make it easy to target specifc skills. Children will love to play these indoor and outdoor games which will consolidate more formal learning through having fun.

162 books, at six levels. Designed to reinforce language gained in the classroom, these Readers can be used for guided or individual reading within small class groups. They have been developed with no English or pinyin in the body of the book (no cheating!), with a full trilingual vocabulary list at the back. The lower level books contain an activity to reinforce the characters learned in the book.

The six diffculty levels of the Readers are colour-coded: Orange, Blue, Green, Purple, Brown and Red. The easiest Readers (Orange) provide very basic vocabulary (often just one noun per page), while the most diffcult Readers (Red) present complex historical and mythological Chinese tales. Each series reinforces vocabulary already taught, as well as adding new words and grammatical concepts.

Big Books are enlarged versions of the Chinese Readers for use in group teaching. They can be used in small class groups along with the individual Readers for guided reading. At the lower levels, the books can be used by the teacher at the front of the class to enable both pronunciation and character recognition as a class-based activity. The higher levels also work as a cultural storytelling book for younger children in English, and older children in Chinese as they deal with myths and legends of China.

Flashcards are designed to boost character recognition skills, consolidate character learning and build up vocabulary. These multi-use, wipe-clean fashcards can be used for one-on-one character recognition reinforcement, or for practising writing Chinese characters. Each set of Flashcards can be dismantled and put together as required by the teacher, enabling individualised lesson planning. The cards show the 400 characters frst learnt by children, and they can also be used by parents at home to help reinforce vocabulary learnt in class.

All 162 Chinese Readers are available on an audio track. This can be played in class, or uploaded to a school intranet for use at home by pupils. Instructions are given in English and the book is read in Mandarin. There are page turning sounds embedded in the fles to enable children to look at their Chinese Readers whilst listening to the audio. After this, the book is read again in Mandarin, with a space left after the page for the child to repeat what they have heard.

Learning any subject should be fun and interactive for primary school children. Primary Mandarin Activity Pages link directly to the Readers and also have puzzles and activities that help to reinforce character recognition – and teach children some traditional Chinese games. There is also a stroke order practice sheet for one character per Reader. The electronic delivery of these sheets means that teachers can download relevant activities for each lesson, either a single sheet, or enough for the whole class. The inclusion of master copies enables teachers to run off copies even if the PDF format is not available to them.