Our Lower School Chinese teacher, Sophia Dalton, was one of our faculty who had the opportunity to visit Lighthouse Charter School. During our time there, she envisioned, created, and prototyped a fun new lesson for her Chinese New Year cultural learning unit. Being brave and willing to try something completely new, she gave it a go just a few weeks later!
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| Final product - 100% functional. Next year: work on polishing the final display |
In the past, students had studied different traditional elements of Chinese New Year, like the use of dragon dances, the eating of oranges, and the use of red envelopes for gifting money. Sophia updated this project by having the students still study the traditional elements and learn the vocabulary in the target language. Students also produced short written summaries in the target language. However, this year, they took that learning and crafted an interactive table display to teach others about Chinese New Year - not only showing off their learning, but also allowing others to learn from what they made! It ended up being a great "pay it forward" kind of experience where younger learners got to experience Chinese New Year and new target language vocabulary because of what the older students created.
Sophia shares that her kids LOVED using the Makey-Makey kits. While the lesson took a bit longer than it had in the past, she felt it was 100% worth it due to the high energy and engagement demonstrated by the students as they created the project. She shared "the project was not too overwhelming to facilitate, and I can see it could be integrated in various projects and used in our upper grades at Lower School." She went on to share that the biggest challenge was the difficulty in staying in target language due to the technical aspects involved, however, it ended up being worth it in the end.
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| Students having big fun working with Makey-Makey |
The final product was not as polished as she wanted, but it was completely student done and engineered. Next year she is looking at ways to polish up the finished display so that it can be displayed in a public space at the school for more people to enjoy.
To quote Sophia, "WE DID IT! Bottom line: we will totally do this next year with some modifications."
