旅行
Lǧxíng — Travel
Grade 5 opens by going somewhere. Students plan a trip, pack for it, and describe one they actually took — which means Grade 4’s 了 gets its first serious workout across several connected sentences.
Unit objectives
- Describe a trip in six or more connected sentences
- Say how they travelled, where they stayed and what they did
- Build a three-day itinerary in Chinese
- Use 打算 — “to plan to”
Key vocabulary
旅行 机场 火车站 酒店 行李 护照 票 打算 参观 照片
Stringing a trip together
去年我去了北京。我坐飞机去的。我参观了长城，然后吃了北京烤鸭。
Qùnián wǒ qùle Běijīng. Wǒ zuò fēijī qù de. Wǒ cānguānle Chángchéng, ránhòu chīle Běijīng kǎoyā. — three completed actions in a row, each marked with 了, joined by 然后. This is what Grade 4 was building towards.
Planning, going, telling
Packing and paperwork
Luggage, passport, ticket — and a packing activity where students justify each item in Chinese.
Getting there and staying
Airports, stations and hotels. Grade 2’s 坐 and 骑 return for longer journeys.
A three-day itinerary
Planning a real trip to a Chinese city, day by day, using 打算.
A trip I took
Six sentences about a real journey, with photos or drawings. Past tense throughout.
Trains that changed the map
China built the world’s largest high-speed rail network from almost nothing in about fifteen years — tens of thousands of kilometres of track, with trains running at 300 km/h and journeys that once took a day and a night now finishing before lunch. For students, the interesting part isn’t the engineering but what it did to distance: cities that were far apart in every practical sense became places you could visit and come back from the same day. Worth comparing with how long it takes to cross their own country by train.
Unit 1 progress check
A light, no-pressure way to see what’s sticking:
- Can your child describe a real trip in four sentences?
- Do they mark completed actions with 了 consistently?
- Can they say where they plan to go using 打算?
Connected sentences are the goal — six separate ones is a pass, six that flow into each other is the target.