Following last year’s successful and popular Mandarin course, we once again put our Year 6 students up for this fascinating language challenge. This term, they swapped one of their weekly French lessons for a Friday afternoon of Mandarin. The sessions have been partly a live lesson with an online teacher, and partly a digital programme of interesting language and cultural activities and games.

Pupils have learnt to place the main Chinese cities and rivers on a map, say greetings, sing ‘happy birthday’, ask ‘how are you’ and recall some numbers. They have also learnt the rudiments of the Chinese alphabet by tracing letters and words on the screen. Some students mentioned that they have particularly enjoyed learning about the Chinese Zodiac signs, and that they found the pronunciation rather ‘awesome!’

Each child is in a small group of only five pupils, allowing maximum attention from their teacher during the live lesson component.

The children thoroughly enjoyed this Mandarin course and we hope they will want to continue learning the language on their own, using some of the excellent available language apps. Try Duolingo Mandarin – it’s free!