三餐
Sān cān — Three Meals a Day
Kindergarten named eight foods. Grade 3 builds meals out of them — what you eat, when you eat it, and how to say something tastes good. Food is where Chinese vocabulary pays off fastest in real life.
Unit objectives
- Name the three meals and say when they happen
- Say what they eat at each, in a full sentence
- Describe taste with 好吃, 甜, 辣 and 酸
- Read a short menu and choose something
Key vocabulary
早饭 午饭 晚饭 饼 粥 饼干 好吃 甜 辣 酸
“Good-eat” and its relatives
Chinese builds a neat family of words by putting 好 in front of a verb:
好吃 good-eat = tasty ·
好喝 good-drink = nice to drink
好看 good-look = good-looking ·
好听 good-listen = pleasant to hear
Four words for the price of one, and a good example of why Chinese vocabulary gets easier as you go rather than harder.
Three meals, four flavours
Breakfast, lunch, dinner
The three meals with times attached, reinforcing Unit 1’s word order at the same time.
What’s for breakfast?
A Chinese breakfast next to a typical one at home — congee and flatbread versus cereal and toast.
Sweet, spicy, sour
Taste words, then a tasting game — sample something and describe it in Chinese before saying whether you liked it.
Reading a menu
A real simplified menu. Students find three dishes they can read and order one aloud.
Dishes in the middle
A Chinese meal usually isn’t plated per person. Dishes go in the centre and everyone takes from them, often with a spoon or the blunt end of the chopsticks, and the person who invited tends to order for the table and keep others’ bowls topped up. Rice is the base that ties the meal together rather than a side. It’s a different assumption about what eating together means — less “this is mine,” more “this is ours” — and children usually take to it enthusiastically.
Unit 3 progress check
A light, no-pressure way to see what’s sticking:
- Can your child say what they ate for breakfast, in a full sentence?
- Can they describe a food as sweet or spicy?
- Do they recognise 饭 inside all three meal words?
This is the most usable unit of the year — if there’s a Chinese restaurant nearby, it’s worth a trip.