动物和栋息地
Dòngwù hé qīxīdì — Animals & Habitats
Kindergarten named animals. Grade 4 says where they live, what they eat and what’s happening to them — the first unit where Chinese is used to talk about something beyond the student’s own life.
Unit objectives
- Name six habitats and match animals to them
- Say what an animal eats and where it lives
- Use 生活在 — “lives in”
- Write four sentences about one animal
Key vocabulary
熊猫 竹子 森林 海洋 沙漠 山 生活 吃 保护 珍稀
The sentence shape for this unit
熊猫生活在中国的山里。它们吃竹子。
Xióngmāo shēnghuó zài Zhōngguó de shān lǐ. Tāmen chī zhúzi. — “Pandas live in China’s mountains. They eat bamboo.” Note 它们, “they” for animals and objects — a new pronoun this unit.
Where animals live
Six habitats
Forest, ocean, desert, mountain, river, grassland — with the radicals students already know hiding inside several of them.
Matching animals to homes
A sorting activity, then building the 生活在 sentence for each pair.
What do they eat?
Diet vocabulary, and the idea of an animal that eats only one thing — which leads straight to pandas.
Animal fact card
Four written sentences and a drawing about one chosen animal — a research task done entirely in Chinese.
The bear that eats the wrong food
The giant panda is a bear with a carnivore’s digestive system that somehow lives almost entirely on bamboo — which it digests so poorly it has to eat for around twelve hours a day. It lives wild only in a handful of mountain ranges in Sichuan and neighbouring provinces, and became the emblem of global conservation partly because of that precariousness. Its Chinese name is charming in itself: 熊猫, “bear-cat.” Students who know the characters for bear and cat can read it before being told what it means.
Unit 5 progress check
A light, no-pressure way to see what’s sticking:
- Can your child say where an animal lives in a full sentence?
- Can they name four habitats?
- Do they use 它们 rather than 他们 for animals?
This unit pairs well with whatever the student is doing in science — the content overlaps, so only the language is new.