Involvement in the Sydney Region project came with support. In particular it came with the connection to the Project Officer who was an Aussie, fluent Mandarin speaker as well as a qualified classroom teacher. He had gathered a heap of resources but most of them were textbook based and I knew I needed something different.

So it meant that I needed to decide on the content and source the technology that would help to present that content to the students involved. This was a huge research task because although there are a myriad of choices online, a lot of them are of poor quality. I needed both language resources and ideas for other culture activities that would be engaging for the students. Starting from scratch meant a lot of bookmarking and evaluating… quite a time investment.

It was a 10 week term of 1 hour and 15 minute lessons each week so I began to think about what else we could do to add variety to the content.

I knew that our local council runs Chinese Calligraphy events in their library so I made contact with them and found out that they have a Chinese Liaison Officer who was happy to help. She provided a contact with a Calligraphy Master – a significant artist. At 83 years of age, Mr Chen was happy to help so we organised a visit for week 7 of the term. More details about that later.

Having Hurstville so close was the perfect solution to having aYum Cha excursion too. So planning began for that as well.

I decided to put the teaching program up on a separate wiki so that access was easy since I knew that it would be required for evaluation at some later date – having it online made things a LOT simpler. You’ll find the program here.