故事与社区
Gùshi yǔ shèqū — Stories and Communities
The narrative year. Students learn to tell what happened — in order, with detail, to someone who wasn’t there. Then they point that skill at their own community and the people in it.
By the end of Grade 7…
- Interpersonal: ask genuine follow-up questions and keep a conversation alive
- Interpretive: read a short authentic article with a dictionary
- Presentational: narrate a complete event in connected paragraphs
- Reading: 720 characters — most everyday written Chinese is now partly accessible
- Structure: connect ideas with 因为…所以, 虽然…但是
Sentences start holding hands
Chinese connectors come in pairs, and both halves are usually said. It feels redundant to an English speaker and is simply correct here:
因为下雨，所以我没去。
Yīnwèi xià yǔ, suǒyǐ wǒ méi qù. — “Because it rained, therefore I didn’t go.” Mastering four of these pairs is what turns a list of sentences into a paragraph.
6 units
讲给我听 — Tell Me About It
Jiǎng gěi wǒ tīng. Narrating the past properly — 了, 过 and time sequencing.
城市与我 — The City and Me
Chéngshì yǔ wǒ. Urban life, moving, and how neighbourhoods change.
我们的环境 — Our Environment
Wǒmen de huánjìng. Recycling, air, water — and arguing for a change.
日常英雄 — Everyday Heroes
Rìcháng yīngxióng. Profiling a real person — interview, write, present.
动手做 — Let’s Get to Work
Dòngshǒu zuò. Service learning: plan something useful and describe it in Chinese.
我社区的故事 — IPA: Stories of My Community
Wǒ shèqū de gùshi. Research, interview and present a story from where the student lives.
Dictionaries become a skill
Grade 7 teaches proper lookup: handwriting recognition, pinyin search, and radical-plus-stroke-count for a character you can neither say nor write. That last method is why Grade 2’s radicals unit keeps paying off — it’s the only way into a genuinely unknown character.
Interviews are real
Units 4 and 6 both ask students to interview an actual person. Where a Chinese-speaking community member is available that’s ideal, but the unit works with any interviewee — the Chinese lives in the write-up and presentation, not necessarily in the interview itself.