It’s Term 3 already and so it’s time to welcome back Mrs Jiaqi Tan after maternity leave! Due to the increasing popularity of Chinese at Mooroolbark College we are now able to have two Chinese teachers, meaning we have twice as many innovative and engaging ideas to share in Mandarin!  

Allen Wu, Mrs Tan’s one-year-old son following in his mother’s footsteps and dressed to impress! 

Term 3 may have seen a bit of a stop-start beginning with another Covid-inspired lockdown, but this has not stopped us from celebrating the fact that we have two Semester 2 Year 9 Chinese classes for the first time. These students will of course be invited along to the Year 8 excursion now planned for the end of this term. Read on for more…! 

Year 8 Languages Celebration Excursion
To celebrate their Language studies and to link with the cultural theme and topic of Food, our Year 8 students will have the opportunity to attend the Year 8 Languages Celebration Excursion. Students will be able to choose to eat at either Shanghai Village (Chinese) or the Hofbräuhaus (German), regardless of which language they have studied. Sadly, after more than forty years of visiting the Cuckoo in Olinda, we have had to find a new German-themed venue as the Cuckoo had to close its door in 2020. We are sure that the Hofbräuhaus will make for an equally exciting cultural experience! With both venues located in the city we plan on using the train for transport, leaving around 10:00am and returning around 2:30pm.   

Recent highlights
During the lockdown students made use of TEAMS & Education Perfect in an innovative way to prepare for both CAT 1 (Oral) & CAT 3 (Comprehension). By sharing the screen to show EP as well as the TEAMS chat, students could compete online for star-chart merits by entering the correct responses in the chat. We gave thumbs-up for the first three correct responses and used this data to ensure on student engagement and participation.  

 

 

On top of this, Chinese also made use of Quizzes on Education Perfect, Kahoot and Quizlet, all of which are great warm-ups for online classes. Furthermore, listening practice (where students listen to the sentences teacher read, type in the target language and provide a translation to earn points for their team) ensures our students finish their learning strongly too, as can be seen below.  

 

 

German Orals
Our Year 8 students have been busy preparing for their oral CATs. 

 

Jonas Bahlo
Languages Key Learning Head