Fun Chinese Learning with Voki

We often used Voki to help our learning in Chinese class. We either type in Chinese characters or record our own voice. A cartoon character will speak Chinese for us. It is a great way to practise our Pinyin, Chinese typing as well as listening skills. We can easily share our Voki via email or send them to our teachers to view and comment on. This is also a fun way to write an essay without it feeling like you are! Sometimes, if there is a test coming up, all the Voki characters are great ways to revise what we had learnt, such as vocabulary and language structures.

Here is how it works and some great examples, you can try with many different languages too!

Y7 Isobel Dolan & Y7 Zachary McCarroll

Y8 Fennie Easton & Y8 Rebecca Kearns

1. Go to http://www.voki.com/create.php
2. Then go to the 'Customize Your character' tab to change what your character looks like.
3.When you are done customizing your character click on the done button.
4. Then, you can either type your message or record it, by going to the 'Give it a voice' tab.
5. For example, lets say you pick text, then you click on the text button, type in your message (in chinese) and give your character a voice, click done when you are finished.
6. Then, to here your message, you can click the play button.
7. You can also go to the backround button and choose your backround, and choose the color of your player, click done for both when you are finished.
8. When you are completely finished with your voki, click publish, call it something, then when it finishes saving, a page should come up with giving you options, you want to click email, then you can email it to someone.

by Y8 Fennie Easton

Happy Chinese New Year 恭喜发财

To celebrate Chinese New Year,

Y7 & Y8 Chinese Studies students had a chance to make Tanghulu-

traditional winter sweets in Beijing.

Making sugar syrup

Tanghulu- strawberry skewers dipped in sugar syrup.

Tanghulu dipped in ice-water

to have a hardened sugar coating

The taste is a combination of sweet and sour, hmm.... yum!

What's an Ipod Touch doing in the Chinese class?

Y7 and Y8 students had their experience with using Ipod Touch to

1. write Chinese characters with correct stroke orders

2. learn 40 most frequently used Chinese radicals (character root)

3. make use of new and commonly used technology to enhance learning experience

Students used the English to Chinese dictionary application called KTdict C-E from Apple Apps Store. They wrote Chinese characters on the screen and allow the Ipod Touch to recognise their handwriting.

With the English to Chinese dictionary App, students could easily search using Chinese characters, the search results include Chinese Pinyin with tone marks, both simplified and traditional characters and the English meanings.

Adding Chinese Handwriting input in Ipod Touch

Settings > General

International > Keyboards

Chinese (Simplified) > Handwriting

Y8 Chinese Stuides

Y8 Chinese Studies students have been working on the topic of Countries and Nationalities. Each student used Comic Life to create a comic page, telling people where they live and what nationality they are.

by Y8 Caitlin Reilly

Science - Term 1

Year 7

The year 7 classes have been learning all about cells and discovering how to view them under a microscope. Below you can see one of the slides made by the students - showing onion cells.

Year 8

There has already been alot of noise from the year 8 students as they investigated sound. A few of the students demonstrated scientifically the range of their singing voices.

Now, we have found the light and students are investigating how light travels and what influences what we see.