读和写
Dú hé xiě — Reading & Writing Short Texts
The turning point of the elementary years. Until now students have read labels, captions and single sentences. This unit gives them a whole paragraph — and then asks them to write one back.
A paragraph students can actually read
Every character below has appeared in an earlier unit. Nothing here is new — which is the entire point.
我叫小明。我九岁。我每天七点起床。我先吃早饭，然后上学。我喜欢足球。
Wǒ jiào Xiǎomíng. Wǒ jiǔ suì. Wǒ měitiān qī diǎn qǐchuáng. Wǒ xiān chī zǎofàn, ránhòu shàng xué. Wǒ xǐhuan zúqiú.
“My name is Xiaoming. I’m nine. I get up at seven every day. First I eat breakfast, then I go to school. I like football.”
Unit objectives
- Read a 5–6 sentence paragraph and answer questions about it
- Write an original paragraph of at least four sentences
- Use ， and 。 correctly — Chinese punctuation
- Read aloud with sensible phrasing rather than character by character
Chinese punctuation, briefly
- 。 — a small hollow circle, not a dot, ends a sentence
- ， — a full-width comma
- 、 — a separate comma used only between items in a list
- There are no spaces between words. Ever.
From sentences to paragraphs
Reading about Xiaoming
The paragraph above, read together, then five comprehension questions answered in Chinese.
Reading aloud
Where to pause when there are no spaces. Students mark the phrase breaks themselves before reading.
Copy, then change
Rewriting Xiaoming’s paragraph with their own name, age and habits — scaffolding before blank-page writing.
Your own paragraph
Four sentences, from nothing. Pinyin is allowed for any word whose character hasn’t been taught yet.
Reading speed is about to jump
Somewhere around 150 characters, something shifts: students stop decoding one character at a time and start recognising two-character words as single units. Reading speed can double in a few weeks. If your student is still slow and halting at the start of this unit, that is completely normal and not a sign of trouble — the slow phase is the runway. Let them reread the same paragraph many times rather than always giving new text; fluency comes from repetition of the familiar, not exposure to the novel.
Unit 7 progress check
A light, no-pressure way to see what’s sticking:
- Can your child read the paragraph aloud without stopping at every character?
- Can they answer a question about it in Chinese?
- Did they write four original sentences?
This is the unit most worth keeping a copy of — comparing it with the Grade 5 portfolio piece shows two years of growth on one page.