This week, the ICT suite has been buzzing with excitement as Year 6 had their first ‘live’ Chinese Mandarin lesson with the Dragons Company. The children logged on and then worked in small groups; either using their webcams to talk and learn with their Mandarin teacher or to work on a variety of games, designed to reinforce vocabulary, or find out about Chinese culture. 

The webcam lessons enabled the children to speak directly to their teacher and we were amazed at how quickly they were all speaking Mandarin, confidently saying ‘Hello, how are you?”, “I’m very well thank you” and other key conversational phrases. The online games encouraged the children to learn how to count to five, how to write numbers in Mandarin and looked at the geography of China. Miss Corkran and Lady Vallance, our Chairman of the Governors’, visited one of the lessons and were incredibly impressed with the rapid progress that the children were making, in their first lesson. There was a clear air of industrious excitement and the children are very much looking forward to their next two lessons.  When asked for feedback, comments included:

“It was amazing!  I loved it because I was learning and it was so much fun!”

“I thought it was really good, especially the teaching with a webcam. The games were great too and I’d give it 10/10!”

“Mandarin was the best! I think it’s the most exciting language to learn, ever!”

“I thought the Mandarin was really, really fun and I learnt a lot.  I especially liked all the games and doing work with my friend and the teacher.  I always felt really good when I got a coin for my achievement.”