So what can you tell about China from a few wrappers?
We started our investigation into China last week and the initial provocation was for the students to investigate some popsicle and candy wrappers. They had to describe the wrappers, try to figure out what was inside, then comment on what they can glean about China from the wrapper.
Well - these are some of the ideas:
It must have been hot when I was there because so many of the wrappers are from popsicles.
Chinese people eat popsicles.
Chinese people eat some of the same candies as we do.
A different language is spoken in China.
Chinese is written using different letters than English.
Words are written using Chinese letters and numbers are in English.
The Chinese like to use cartoons.
Some Chinese foods are familar and some are unfamiliar.
Apart from the flavors, that are still a mystery - this we will investigate further another day, the other main interest was the language of Mandarin. One of the wrappers was for Mentos so one student commented that if we know the letters that make the word Mentos in Chinese we could use those "letters" to make other words. Then we would be able to read other things in Chinese, and maybe figure out some of the unfamiliar flavors.
I was interested in the misconception about the Chinese language of Mandarin. Students will always build on previous understandings in their construct new ones. All of the students were familiar with Spanish, which uses the same letter system (for the most part) to English, and they had applied this knowledge to a language new to them that of Mandarin.
So, on to speaking Mandarin.
No comments:
Post a Comment