城市与我
Chéngshì yǔ wǒ — The City and Me
Grade 4 named the buildings. Grade 7 asks what a place is like to live in, how it has changed, and what it means to move away from one — the first unit that treats a city as something with a history rather than a map.
Unit objectives
- Describe how a place has changed, using past and present together
- Discuss advantages and disadvantages of city and country life
- Use 以前 and 现在 in the same sentence
- Interview someone about a place they used to live
Key vocabulary
农村 城市 搬家 以前 变化 发展 人口 太拥挤 方便 家乡
Then and now, in one sentence
以前这里有很多小店，现在都是高楊了。
Yǐqián zhèlǐ yǒu hěn duō xiǎo diàn, xiànzài dōu shì gāolóu le. — “There used to be lots of small shops here; now it’s all high-rises.” Note the 了 at the end marking the change — the same use Grade 3 met with the weather.
A place with a history
City and country
Vocabulary for both, and an honest list of what each is good and bad at.
Before and after
Photo pairs of the same Chinese street thirty years apart. Students describe what changed.
Moving
Why people move, what they gain and lose — and the word 家乡, which carries more weight than “hometown.”
Which is better?
A structured discussion using Grade 6’s polite disagreement and Grade 5’s comparisons.
Interview someone older
Asking a family member or neighbour how their area has changed. Reported back in Chinese.
My town, then and now
A written piece of eight to ten sentences using past and present throughout.
The fastest urbanisation in history
In 1980 roughly one in five people in China lived in a city. Today it is around two in three — several hundred million people moving in a single lifetime, the largest migration humans have recorded. Whole cities appeared where there were fields; villages emptied of everyone under fifty. It also produced the phenomenon of “left-behind children” raised by grandparents while parents worked far away, and the annual Spring Festival crush of people travelling back. It is worth handling as a real and complicated thing rather than a statistic — twelve-year-olds can hold that.
Unit 2 progress check
A light, no-pressure way to see what’s sticking:
- Can your child describe a change using 以前 and 现在?
- Can they argue for city or country life with reasons?
- Did the interview produce something they could report?
The interview works with any adult. The Chinese lives in the write-up, not necessarily in the conversation itself.