我的作品集
Wǒ de zuòpǐnjí — The Portfolio
Six years of Chinese, assembled by the student into something they own and can show. The elementary capstone is not a test — it’s a piece of evidence, curated by the person who made it.
What goes in it
- A written self-introduction — rewritten now, and placed beside the Grade 3 version so two years of growth sit on facing pages
- Three pieces of their own writing, chosen by the student, with a sentence on why each was picked
- A recorded two-minute spoken presentation
- A character log — everything they can read, which for most will run past 400
- One page on a place in the Chinese-speaking world they’d like to visit, and why
Why the student chooses
The selection is the assessment. Asking a ten-year-old to decide which three pieces of their writing are best — and to say why in Chinese — requires them to have a view about their own work. That’s a different and more durable thing than scoring well on a test someone else designed, and it is the habit the middle-school IPAs will build on.
Five lessons to build it
Look back
Students read through everything they’ve written since Grade 3 — usually the first time they’ve seen the whole arc at once.
Rewrite the introduction
The same task as Grade 3 Unit 8, done again from scratch. The comparison is the point.
Choose and justify
Picking three pieces and writing one Chinese sentence explaining each choice.
Record the presentation
Two minutes, recorded rather than performed live — so students can re-record and hear themselves improve.
Share it
Portfolios laid out for families and younger classes to look through. Six years deserves an audience.
Six years in, and the hard part is done
A student finishing here reads 400 characters, writes 240, and can hold a real conversation about their own life. In U.S. terms that is roughly a strong first-year high-school Mandarin student — but with six years of listening behind it, which is the component that cannot be crammed later and which most classroom learners never get. Grades 6 to 8 will roughly double the character count, but they will not have to build the ear again. That work is finished.
Keep the portfolio
Practically speaking, it is useful later for:
- Placement conversations when changing school or programme
- The Grade 8 exit portfolio, which explicitly builds on it
- Showing a student in a discouraged moment what they used to sound like
The last one turns out to matter most. Nothing restarts a stalled learner like reading their own Grade 3 writing.