Learning from the Experts! Part 2 of 3

The second session that I attended at MOE Excel Fest was on "Making Chinese Characters Learning Fun and Enjoyable for Your Child", conducted by Guangyang Primary. The school developed a "汉字笔画操", which was created with lower primary students in mind. During the session, the school demonstrated to parents on how to use our body parts such as our hands and legs to illustrate the basic Chinese strokes.

For example, look at the picture below. Note that the sharing session was conducted in Mandarin, so I'm translating it into English to my best ability, pardon me for any misinterpretation.

1. Putting our hands in-front of us (see the action of 1st boy), it looks like we're surrounding (围) ourselves, so it represents the bigger mouth (大口) surrounding the other strokes within it. 
2. Putting our right arm horizontally in-front of us (see the action of 2nd boy), it represents the stroke "橫".
3. Putting our right arm horizontally and left arm flexed up vertically (see the action of 3rd boy), it represents the word "十".
4. Similar to point 2 as above, so it's the stroke "橫".
5. Punching our right fist out to the front, it represents the stroke "点".

With the above explanation, can you guess which is the word? Well, it's "国".

It was really a very fun learning experience for the parents present at the sharing session as we really learnt quite a number of the basic strokes, and were even asked to invent action for some of the strokes. An example, for my table, we were asked to invent an action for the 部首 "虫", so I did the wriggling worm action to represent it.

It would be quite interesting to teach the basic strokes to our children and have fun learning Chinese! Hence, if the school ever conducts such a sharing session again, do sign up for it! :)

Watch out for the next and last part in my next post...

Credits to be given to the school for the sharing. Any opinion reflected in this post is my own, and not related to the school.